Monthly late lunch at a pub featuring, food, beers, and casual conversation to share our experiences with Agile methods/practices/approaches/events. A time for more discussion of the speaker meeting topic (or not) from Wednesday night.

Pair Programming has many benefits for a team above and beyond coding, yet it's still one of the hardest XP practices to get into. Ping Pong pairing is a lot of fun and is my favourite way to pair. It has a game-like style that instils good pairing and TDD practices. So come along to the next XPDX meeting to try it out. It doesn't matter if you've been pairing for years or want to try it for the first time. This will be a chance to learn from each other. We'll spend a little time getting to know the mechanics of Ping Pong pairing, do a brief demonstration, and then all pair up for over an hour of practice.

Absolutely positively bring a laptop with you. We'll be using Java, JUnit, and Eclipse. A big time saver will be to ensure that you have the Java SDK installed beforehand.

Thanks to VersionOne there'll be pizza for thirty! <<<

Be there at 6:30pm for the pizza. We'll start at 7pm. At 9pm we'll move on to a local bar.

Monthly pub lunch featuring our stories about "doing" & "being" Agile; i.e., using XP, Scrum, Lean, et al, for software development. Seasoned practitioners and new-to-Agile welcome. We're usually at one (or more) of the long tables in the middle.

Casual conversation over no-host lunch about all things relevant to Agile software development. Sometimes a few of us show up to talk, more often a dozen (or more) practitioners join the fun.

• If your business card says programmer, tester, project manager, product manager or coach (or would if you had one)
• If you use Agile methods, practices, principles or approaches
• If you seek opportunities to keep working for companies that prefer an Agile approach
• If you want to recruit dev team members who know how to work in an Agile environment
• If you're curious about any the above Come on over for lunch.

We welcome practitioners from all Agile flavors--Scrum, XP, DSDM, Crystal, FDD, AUP, Adaptive, EVO, etc.

Learn everything you need to know about agile delivery in this three-day course. We use an innovative course structure that allows you to do real agile software development in cross-functional teams. Using two instructors and splitting the group as appropriate, we ensure that programmers get plenty of technical depth without boring everyone else.

You'll learn:

• Eliminating bugs
• Incremental requirements
• Working with stakeholders
• Customer tests and acceptance test-driven development
• Test-driven development
• Refactoring
• Code management
• Continuous integration
• Exploratory testing
• Pairing
• Incremental design and risk-driven architecture
• Cross-functional collaboration

Programmers, testers, on-site customers, business analysts, project managers, product managers, ScrumMasters, coaches, team leads, and anyone else on an agile team will benefit from this course.

Results

After completing this course, you will be prepared to:

• Work in a cross-functional team with on-site customers, testers, and programmers
• Understand and accommodate diverse stakeholder opinions
• Build and ship complete increments of software in one-week iterations
• Create nearly bug-free code using test-driven development, refactoring, and exploratory testing
• Prevent build failures with continuous integration
• Build technical infrastructure incrementally alongside features

Testimonials

"I don't know how they pulled off the [class project], but going through four iterations brought the concepts home. Also I was a programmer wanting to learn about the project development side. Diana's four-quadrant diagrams (about stakeholders) were enlightening as was Jim's [incremental design] box diagrams and analogy of TDD to double-entry bookkeeping. Thank you!!" --Steve Tamura, Developer

"Extremely educational--lots of new material. Well organized." --Dave Goldman, Senior Developer, Inspiration Software

"They were great. They were funny, understanding, and answered questions well." --Ven Cohen, Programmer/Technical Lead, ISI

Casual conversation over no-host lunch about all things relevant to Agile software development. Sometimes a few of us show up to talk, more often a dozen (or more) practitioners join the fun.

• If your business card says programmer, tester, project manager, product manager or coach (or would if you had one)
• If you use Agile methods, practices, principles or approaches
• If you seek opportunities to keep working for companies that prefer an Agile approach
• If you want to recruit dev team members who know how to work in an Agile environment
• If you're curious about any the above Come on over for lunch.

We welcome practitioners from all Agile flavors--Scrum, XP, DSDM, Crystal, FDD, AUP, Adaptive, EVO, etc.

David Wheeler will be giving his "Unit Test Your Database" talk. It was well-received at Open Source Bridge; now he's giving it to an audience of Agile practitioners.

We’re all used to unit testing our applications by now. The Extreme and Agile programming movements have done a great deal to promote unit testing, to the extent that many of us are now dependent on tests to assure that our applications work reliably. But how often do we test the database underlying our applications? Given that the database, as the repository for all of the knowledge and data for an application, just might be the single most important part of that application, the time for standardized database unit testing has come.

This talk promotes the practice of writing and running unit tests that directly test the schema, storage, and functionality of application databases. Following a review of the available PostgreSQL unit testing frameworks, we’ll review examples of testing tables, views, columns, constraints, indexes, triggers, and functions. The idea is to promote complete test coverage every aspect of a database, independent of application unit tests, to ensure reliably canonical data integrity.

Pizza and networking at 6:30pm, 7pm talk, beer afterwards.

We're going to do a group activity on TDD. Please bring some tests -- good, bad, or interesting / enlightening in some way. (A USB stick is a good idea.) We’re going to discuss them, refactor them as a group, and generally use them as the fixed points around which we can discuss all things that improve our ability to design well (since design is what TDD is about)

Pizza and networking at 6:30; meeting at 7; beer and discussion afterwards.

The topics for this meeting are:

• node.js - evented I/O for JavaScript on the server
• Google Closure Tools - everything you need to build a Google-class web app
• Testing asynchronous code with Screw.Unit and Blue Ridge

Bring a laptop if you have one. This will be an activity night.

There will be pizza, kindly provided by Jive Software. Plus we will have essentials on hand for celebrating the JavaScript Admirers' first birthday.

Feel free to join our mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/pdxjs if you too are a JavaScript admirer. Or visit our web site for more information at http://pdxjs.com/.

Announcing Agile Open Northwest 2010! This Agile Open Space event will be held February 9th and 10th, 2010, in the Seattle Center Northwest Rooms. Please see http://www.agileopennorthwest.org for registration information and further details.

We invite you to our fourth annual Agile Open Northwest conference. Alternating each year between Portland and Seattle, AONW conferences bring together practicing members of the Northwest Agile communities to explore the latest developments in agile software development. We held our third annual event last year in Portland and enjoyed another great success. Registration is $125.00 for both days, including light breakfast and lunch. This low-cost regional conference is a great opportunity to connect with the local agile community, experts and novices alike.

Please join us this year as we host 125 experienced, collaborative, committed agile practitioners from the Northwest U.S. (and beyond) in tackling the issues around our recurring theme "Agile for Real." As in past years, attendance is limited to a predetermined number in order retain the many advantages a small conference has to offer.

Here is a comment from a previous attendee:

"These two-day Agile Open Northwest conferences are an extremely good value. ..[Y]ou learn directly from practitioners in the agile community what works and what doesn't. I attended the first two of these conferences, they were stunningly good... loads of practical, useful stuff and stimulating discussions." -- Ian Savage, PNSQC Program Chair

More information can be found at http://www.agileopennorthwest.org. Registration is open now. We look forward to seeing you there.

This month Max Ogden will be on hand to talk about Couchappspora < http://github.com/maxogden/couchappspora >, the social communication revolution that he has started. Couchappspora is inspired by Diaspora < http://www.joindiaspora.com/ > but is built as a couchapp using CouchDB < http://couchdb.apache.org/ >.

In addition, Jesse Hallett will present an end-to-end tutorial on how to set up JSTestDriver < http://code.google.com/p/js-test-driver/ > to automate the process of running QUnit tests < http://docs.jquery.com/Qunit > using QUnitTestRunnerPlugin < http://github.com/jivesoftware/QUnitTestRunnerPlugin >. We have had talks on testing before, including a great talk from Duncan Beevers on simulating time with Bobble < http://github.com/duncanbeevers/bobble >. In this talk Jesse will focus on automation and asynchronous tests, including more discussion on when simulated time or asynchronicity is the better choice and when to mix and match.

There will be pizza provided by Jive Software.

Feel free to join our mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/pdxjs if you too are a JavaScript admirer. Or visit our web site for more information at http://pdxjs.com/.

We're meeting after the SAO day-long event,"Blurring the Lines between QA & Dev in an Agile Environment." Local Agilists will reflect on what we heard or said in presentations at the event, then we'll apply "personal kanban" to create table topic lists for the evening.

You don't have to have attended the SAO event to join us.

• If your business card says programmer, tester, project manager, product manager or coach (or would if you had one)
• If you use Agile methods, practices, principles or approaches
• If you seek opportunities to keep working for companies that prefer an Agile approach
• If you want to recruit team members who know how to work in an Agile environment
• If you're curious about any the above, Come on over.

We welcome practitioners from all Agile-related frameworks--Scrum, XP, Adaptive, EVO, Lean, Kanban, Scrumban, Crystal, FDD, AUP, DSDM, etc. And people who want to learn about same.

Test Driven Development has reached maturity. Goad Testing takes you a level deeper, examining what tests really are and using the outcome of that exercise to derive new ways of keeping software - both production and test - healthy, flexible, and on-specification. Making distinctions is a critical aspect of a test: It allows a test to serve as an executable specification. Sometimes this ability is lost in the course of maintenance. Goad testing is a way to prevent that from happening without introducing significant extra work or complexity.

About Max Guernsey III, Hexagon Software LLC: I’ve been in the software development industry for over ten years. Nearly half of that has been spent mentoring teams in various aspects of Agility, including Design Patterns, TDD, User Story creation & analysis. In the last few years, I’ve become interested in how Lean and Agile fit together.

This event is free and is at our new location, Puppet Labs. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion of chicken wings and other agile conundrums.

Difficulty iterating? Stuck in a rut at work? Throw caution to the wind and host a hackathon! You can finally play with Shiny Thing 2.0, show it off to your friends and teammates, all in a format that will encourage you to work in small, iterative slices.

Growing in popularity in recent years, hackathons provide a venue for folks to get together, explore new ideas and (hopefully!) build working software in the span of a couple of days. Come learn about their use in the corporate space and the public space at large, how to sponsor one, and how to make the event create lasting effects. We'll also explore the parallels between agile development and hackathons, and how each is good practice for the other.

Ben Houston is a pragmatic software engineer who is currently in love with mazes and geometry.

This event is free and is at Puppet Labs. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion of chicken wings and other agile conundrums.

It's time for your yearly Agile tune-up! Has your Agile team made its new year's resolutions yet? If not, this month's AgilePDX meeting will help. It's all about helping you understand what you can do to improve the state of your Agile practice.

James Shore will kick things off with a description of Agile Fluency. He'll describe multiple levels of proficiency and help you figure out where your team is today. Then, he'll provide specific techniques and practices to focus on as you work to reach the next level.

Next, we'll turn it over to you! You'll break into groups focused on the issues that matter most to your teams. You'll have the opportunity to learn from each other's experiences and to discuss how you can improve your team. Experienced Agile practitioners will be on hand to answer questions and help you figure out which improvements will make the most difference for you.

This event is free and is at Puppet Labs. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion of agile fluency

Have you ever begun an Agile adoption, only to watch in dismay and puzzlement as the change fizzles out like a wet firecracker? Have you generated excitement for these new ideas, seen them seem to take root and grow, only to find a year later that people have fallen back into their old ways of doing things? Or, are they now cherry picking Agile practices, perhaps using Agile terms, but ignoring the Agile values? If so, you are not alone. In this talk, Tamara Sulaiman Runyon discusses some reasons why simple practice adoption is not enough; and why transformation is so difficult to make stick in many organizations. Topics include: the nature of change and complex systems models - where do we fit? The key role that vision and leadership play in instigating and supporting transformation; the potential iceberg of organizational culture as a change blocker, as well as people aspects - the levels of discomfort caused by any change; and measuring the growth of competence as Agile practices and Values are assimilated.

Presenter Bio:

Tamara Sulaiman Runyon has been assisting teams in transitioning to agile methods both as a hands-on ScrumMaster and as an Agile Coach and Scrum trainer since 2003. Her passion lies in helping organizations plan and implement Agile transformations. In her role as Enterprise Agile Coach at Intel, she is deeply involved with leading and supporting Agile teams and practices throughout the organization.

She is a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) and Project Management Professional (PMP). Tamara is the co-originator of the AgileEVM materials and processes that integrate the traditional project management practice of Earned Value Management with the Scrum framework. As a thought leader she is currently serving on the Agile Alliance Board of Directors. Tamara continues to publish articles on Agile-related topics in industry publications such as Agile Journal, Methods and Tools, InfoQ, Projects@Work and gantthead.com. She also shares her experiences, ideas and expertise as a presenter and speaker at conferences.

This event is free and is at Puppet Labs. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion of agile fluency

What alternatives are there to the predominant linear management approach which relies on reductionism and the ability to predict. How can you avoid the temptation to engineer and control outcomes by manipulating the component parts of organizations business and process?

Ola describes his nonlinear approach, where he combines Real Options, the Mikado Method, and evolutionary design to form a dynamic, diametrically opposite perspective to the familar linear management view.

Presenter:

Ola Ellnestam likes to combine people, technology and business which is best done with simple means and flexible processes. More than that he likes to share his knowledge and experiences because that’s how new insights are created according to him. Ola is a founder of Agical.se , a board member of the Agile Aliance, director of the Agile Alliance conference sponsorship program, and co-author (with Daniel Brolund) of The Mikado Method book.

This event is free and is at Puppet Labs. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion of agile fluency

Also, on Thursday, April 19, join Ola for a one-day workshop on The Mikado Method

For more information on the workshop, see: http://calagator.org/events/1250461927

Prioritize People Over Process: The Brain Science of Happy Agile Teams

Learn how to apply neuroscience and psychology to more effectively work with each other as a happy team that produces better software. You will take away:

• Concrete techniques for more quickly building trust on teams
• Actionable ideas for managing social stress
• Proven techniques for getting the best results from each other

Comments from the Game Developers Conference presentation of similar material:

"Mr. Scott Crabtree was also an absolutely excellent speaker - very inspiring, thought-provoking, and energizing! Please have him back on the same topic of the importance of happiness within teams in the future!"

"The speaker about happiness was amazing."

"Scott Crabtree was Excellent...an excellent tutorial that I would recommend to anyone."

Presenter:

Scott Crabtree, Chief Happiness Officer, Happy Brain Science: www.HappyBrainScience.com/about

This event is free and is at Puppet Labs. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm and will run until 8:30.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion of agile fluency

Agile Chartering ignites your project Liftoff in a way that gives impetus to the project team, and the business, and sets the endeavor on the trajectory to success. Project leaders and team members use Agile Chartering to inform, inspire, and align everyone involved in product delivery. Experience a journey through the framework for effective, yet lightweight, "just enough" Agile chartering, including the three key elements of inspiring Purpose, collaborative Alignment, and dynamic Context. Learn why real-life team members say Agile Chartering provided the initial momentum that powered their projects toward success.

In this high energy talk, Diana Larsen, co-author of Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams and Projects, will take you on an exploration of ways to accomplish team and project Liftoffs, including the vital step of chartering the project.

Bio:

Diana Larsen partners with clients in the software industry to create, guide, and fortify resilient workplaces and improve project performance. In addition to consulting with and coaching leaders and teams on adopting Agile work systems, she draws on 20+ years of working with technical professionals to lead team, project, and whole system processes for collaborative thinking and planning. Diana co-authored Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams and Projects and Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great. She serves on the board of directors of the Agile Alliance and is a principal of FutureWorks Consulting LLC.

Details and Pizza:

This event is free and is at Puppet Labs. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion of launching Agile Projects.

Bio:

Jez Humble is a Principal at ThoughtWorks Studios, and co-author of the Jolt Award winning Continuous Delivery, published in Martin Fowler’s Signature Series. He has worked with a variety of platforms and technologies, consulting for non-profits, telecoms, financial services, and online retail companies. His focus is on helping organisations deliver valuable, high-quality software frequently and reliably through implementing effective engineering practices.

Details and Pizza:

Many thanks to New Relic for covering the speaker costs!

This event is free and is at Puppet Labs. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion of launching Agile Projects.

Talk description:

Businesses rely on getting valuable new software into the hands of users as fast as possible, while making sure that they keep their production environments stable. Continuous Delivery is a revolutionary and scalable approach to software delivery that enables any team, including teams within enterprise IT organizations, to achieve rapid, reliable releases through better collaboration between developers, testers, DBAs and operations, and automation of the build, deploy, test and release process.

I’ll start by discussing the value of CD to the business, inspired by the lean startup movement. I’ll then present the principles and practices involved in continuous delivery, including value stream mapping, the deployment pipeline, acceptance test driven development, zero-downtime releases, and incremental development. I’ll cover how CD is enabled by an ecosystem including Devops, cloud computing, agile testing, and continuous deployment.

Frank D’Andrea is an enthusiastic Agile evangelist, mentor, educator, and most recently, the Vice-President of Software Development at Tater Tot Designs. He has extensive experience in managing web and software development projects as well as mobile application and Content Management System development efforts. He is an experienced process improvement specialist with expertise in both Agile and Waterfall development environments.

Frank has leadership experience in both Product and Project Management as well as hands-on experience as a Certified Scrum Professional. Frank has been involved in numerous extracurricular activities as well; such as a 10-year stint of teaching poetry, literature, creative writing, and composition classes at Portland Community College; representing Portland as a member of Portland’s National Poetry Slam team; publishing and performing with Haiku Inferno, and getting his J.D. from Willamette University College of Law.

Here's the abstract:

Agile Still Sucks.

Bringing Agile into an organization is never a good idea. It is disruptive, complicated, and very expensive. It brings organizational dysfunction to the surface and shines a bright light on business practices that sabotage teams and fail to deliver value to clients. Further, unwitting teams may adopt a version of Agile that becomes dogmatic, inflexible, and interested in perpetuating the "process” of Agile rather than being, well, agile. The only thing worse than bringing Agile in, is trying to get Agile right.

That said, everyone should be using Agile. This presentation will explore ways to bring Agile into an organization, how to choose the right "flavor” of Agile, and what to do when it goes badly – because it will. This presentation will also examine how to expand the Agile conversation from within the software development team, outward to internal stakeholders, and eventually into client engagements.

Details and Pizza:

This event is free and is at Puppet Labs. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion of launching Agile Projects.

Bring your questions. Bring your Problems. Join us for Lean Coffee facilitated by Diana Larsen.

Lean Coffee started in Seattle in 2009 when Jim Benson and Jeremy Lightsmith wanted to combine lean and Knowledge work. Now, Seattle Lean Coffee happens every week, and is very popular.

Lean Coffee is a structured, but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build an agenda, and begin talking. Conversations are directed and productive because the agenda for the meeting was democratically generated.

(http://leancoffee.org/)

Details and Pizza:

This event is free and is at Puppet Labs. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

Arlo Belshee and James Shore present "This One Goes to 121:"

We will explore excellence. What it is, how one achieves it, and how one exceeds it. What determines the outer limits of your team s capability? How can you be continually more awesome? We've each got a decade of transitioning to (Jim), being on (Arlo), and building (both) awesome Agile teams.

Details and Pizza:

This event is free. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion of launching Agile Projects.

Agile Fluency Tune-Up

It's time for your annual tune-up! Do you want to get more mileage out of your Agile teams? Is one of your New Years' resolutions to figure out how to get the results Agile promises? If so, come to AgilePDX's annual tune-up session, hosted by James Shore and Diana Larsen. They'll walk you through four levels of Agile fluency and how to make the leap from one level to the next, then help you apply those ideas to your real-world situation. You'll go home with specific, actionable ideas you can use with your own teams.

Details and Pizza:

This event is free. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion.

As developers, we've created heuristics that help us build robust systems and employed test-driven development (TDD) to improve code design and counter instability. Yet object-oriented development principles and TDD have failed to gain traction in the database world. That’s because database development involves an additional driving force—the data.

Max Guernsey shows how to treat databases as objects with classes of their own—rather than as containers of objects—and how to drive database designs from tests. He illustrates a way to give these database classes the ability to upgrade old data without introducing undue risk. Max also shares how to apply good object-oriented design principles to database classes and how to enforce semantic connections between databases and clients. Max demonstrates how it all works together, ensuring that your production databases work exactly the same as test databases, minimizing the risk of design changes, and enabling client applications to more easily keep up with database changes.

Come for pizza & networking from 6:30pm. The program starts at 7:00 pm.

Speaker Bio Max Guernsey is currently a Managing Member at Hexagon Software LLC. He has 15 years of experience as a professional software developer. For nearly half that time, he has been blogging, writing, and delivering lectures on the topic of agile and test-driven database development. For much of Max’s professional career, he has been a consultant, advising a variety of software companies in many different industries using multiple programming and database technologies. In most of these engagements, he spent months or even years helping teams implement cutting-edge techniques such as test-driven development, object-oriented design, acceptance-test-driven development, and agile planning.

Max has always been a “hands-on” consultant, working with teams for long periods of time to help them build both software and skills. This series of diverse, yet deep, engagements helped him gain a unique understanding of the database-related testing and design problems that impede most agile teams. Since 2005, he has been thinking, writing, blogging, lecturing, and creating developer-facing software dedicated to resolving these issues.

Max posts regularly on his Twitter account (@MaxGuernseyIII) and his blog (maxg3prog.blogspot.com).

What do a 17th century painter’s workshop, an international photographic cooperative, and an early 20th century design house have in common with a modern software development team? On the surface it may not seem like much, but bringing a group of makers together to work presents special challenges and opportunities, regardless of field.

In this session we’ll explore what worked, and didn’t, for several groups of historical makers. We’ll draw parallels with agile software development teams, and discuss coaching strategies around the examples provided.

Nathaniel Cadwell has over thirteen years of strategic consulting experience in software development, Agile enablement, and change management, helping organizations achieve dramatic improvement in the efficiency of their software delivery. In his current role, Nathaniel is an Agile Coach working closely with software development teams. He has presented, or co-presented, sessions on Agile coaching, Agile portfolio management, and facilitation skills at multiple venues in the United States and abroad.

Details and Pizza:

This event is free. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion.

Fluency is "what you can say without having to think about how to say it." "Refactoring" is a language that describes ways to make your code suck less. I want to inspire you to become more fluent in that language, so you can make your code suck less without having to think about it.

Note for Agile PDX: this presentation is in no small part an homage to, and a continuation of, "Therapeutic Refactoring" by Katrina Owen. If you have time, you might enjoy watching that talk first: http://confreaks.com/videos/1071-cascadiaruby2012-therapeutic-refactoring

About the speaker...

Sam Livingston is a developer from sunny* Portland, Oregon. Sam's been working in code since 1998, in Ruby since 2006, and at LivingSocial since 2012. He likes TDD/BDD/TATFT, pair programming, and refactoring—but finds that long walks on the beach tend to result in sandy keyboards.

• YMMV

Intel Corporation’s preeminent development conference is back for its 7th year. This year’s conference focuses on building Culture, Community, and Craft to enable you and your teams to deliver faster with higher quality and customer value.

Discover the latest in Agile methods, Lean practices, requirements engineering, complex adaptive systems and more. Each week offers opportunities in which you can participate, including:

Keynotes with leaders and innovators from industry Tutorials and workshops, from basic through advanced Experience reports from leading development teams across Intel Networking events

Come practice Pair Programming and Test-Driven Development with us. Pair Programming is an Agile methodology in which two developers share a single workstation and work together to solve some problem. Test-Driven Development is a development process that relies on the repetition of a short development cycle driven by writing tests before any implementation code. Red, Green, Refactor.

Contact ACM:
Website: www.acm.pdx.edu
E-mail: [email protected]
Facebook: www.facebook.com/pdxacm

Conversation and peer mentoring starting at 6, presentations at 7. For more information, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter or join the #testrubypdx Slack channel (under PDX.rb).

Presentations

Bernerd Schaefer: Refactor Your Feature Specs!

expect(page).to have_css(".active"). It's clear what this line does, but what is it really testing? And why? Together we'll take some real-life feature specs and refactor them so the intent of the spec shines through.

Portland's testing user group for Ruby developers! Conversation and peer mentoring starting at 6, presentations at 7. For more information, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter or join the #testrubypdx Slack channel (under the pdxruby team).

How and Why to Test Rake Tasks - Brett Chalupa

Testing classes and modules is essential to writing well tested Ruby code. However, testing Rake tasks is not as straight-forward. In this talk, you will learn how and why it is valuable to test Rake tasks. This talk will go over testing regular ole Rake tasks and Rake tasks in a Rails app. Before you know it, you will be writing Rake tasks in a test-driven manner, hooray!

Portland's testing user group for Ruby developers! Conversation and peer mentoring starting at 6, presentations at 7. For more information, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter or join the #testrubypdx Slack channel (under the pdxruby team).

Paul Baker - Golden Thorns: Lessons from the Gilded Rose Kata

The Gilded Rose Kata is a fairly well known kata that utilizes a "golden master testing" strategy to provide safety while the developer refactors a messy legacy code base in order to add new features. I will walk through my take on the kata and then review some lessons that I have learned as a sr. developer working with legacy code and where this pattern can be helpful.

Portland's testing user group for Ruby developers! Conversation and peer mentoring starting at 6, presentations at 7. For more information, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter or join the #TestRubyPDX Slack channel (under the pdxruby team). We are still looking for speakers, so if you're interested, visit testrubypdx.org/speak for details and suggested topics!

Portland's testing user group for Ruby developers! Conversation and peer mentoring starting at 6, presentations at 7. For more information, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter or join the #testrubypdx Slack channel (under the pdxruby team). We are still looking for speakers, so if you're interested, visit testrubypdx.org/speak for details and suggested topics!

Test Ruby PDX is a user group focused on Ruby testing. In particular, we are developers interested in testing our own code. We offer pizza, conversation, and peer mentoring starting at 6 before moving on to presentations at 7. This month, Daniel Dreier of Puppet will talk to us about how to test command line apps using Cucumber and Aruba.

Agilists from across the Pacific Northwest will converge at the Nike World Headquarters for a career changing day. This is a one-day conference with 3 keynote speakers (Richard Sheridan, best-selling author of Joy Inc., Gene Kim, founder and CTO of Tripwire, and Mamie Jones, SVP of Product Development at Intuit) as well as 20 workshops on Leadership, Product, Technical Enablement, Leadership, Innovation, Agility and much more.

Use this promo code, MeetAC17 for a 10% discount on registration if you register by 8/23/2017!

For a long time, folks (Rob included) misinterpreted Behavior Driven Development (BDD) as “Test-Driven Development done right,” as Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) with better tools, or as an umbrella term embracing both TDD and ATDD. So, how is BDD really done, and where does TDD fit in, if at all? It turns out that the real problem may lie in trying to pin down rigorous definitions for these terms, and trying to determine when to do which style of testing. Rob coaches teams to be prepared to use the BDD cycle and the TDD cycle when appropriate, and to be willing to move fluidly between these two intertwined cycles on a daily basis. Rob has witnessed significantly improved levels of communication, alignment, quality, and enthusiasm on teams -- and just in mere days, when BDD is embraced as the central activity of the whole team.

You’ll help explore why, when, and how to use both TDD and BDD together to build the most valuable and maintainable software possible.

Rob Myers is principle instructor and coach at Agile for All. He has over 30 years of professional experience with software development teams, and has been training and coaching organizations in Agile engineering practices since 1998. His courses blend fun, practical hands-on labs, "Training From the Back of the Room” learning techniques, and relevant first-person stories from both successful and not-so-successful Agile implementations. His clients have included many start-ups as well as Fortune 100 multinationals. Rob is currently working on his first technical book, Essential Test-Driven Development.

In an effort to raise the effectiveness of Scrum, the Scrum Alliance created the Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) program (AKA Agile Engineering course.) A Certified Scrum Developer is someone who has demonstrated through a combination of formal training and a technical skills assessment that he or she has a working understanding of Scrum principles and has learned specialized Agile engineering skills.

This three-day class is aimed at helping software development professionals and teams be more effective when implementing Scrum and other Agile methodologies. You will learn how to create and maintain high quality systems through industry standard practices such as Test Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI) and common software design patterns. This class was specifically designed to deliver the core Agile Development Practices Learning Objectives of the CSD program and should prepare the participant to successfully pass the Scrum Alliance CSD Candidate Assessment.

This class focuses on automated testing, TDD (heavily covered in class), Continuous Integration, Design Concepts (Design Principles and Practices) and Extreme Programming (XP) practices. Class is hands-on, and you will participate in a project where you will build an actual feature using Agile practices and learn about the technical practices. You'll learn about how team members interact during sprints. Other topics covered include Technical Debt: Strategies & Techniques to help reduce technical debt.

In order to earn the CSD certification, the Scrum Alliance requires at least five days of formal training followed by a CSD assessment/evaluation. This class fulfills 21 of the required 35 hours and can be paired with the Certified ScrumMaster class to complete the requirement.