Technical Aspects of Agile

The Technical Aspects of Agile training course looks at the benefits of project management, aimed at developers and team leaders who are already familiar with Agile approaches. This two day course examines three important technical aspects of Agile open source software development : pair programming; test driven development; and re-factoring.

Pair programming on first impressions, especially in senior management, can seem completely counter-intuitive. Surely, by getting two people to do the job of one person you’re just halving your productivity? A substantial body of research shows quite the opposite - that pair programming doesn’t reduce productivity, but maintains productivity whilst substantially reducing the number of serious defects that are found in the code.

Test driven development benefits the software development process by automatically testing the practice of software functionality. The course covers writing these tests and coding against them using the framework JUnit.

The re-factoring techniques understand and accept that software development code, over time, can become messy and disorganised. The advantages of test driven development allow for principled clean up of code.

• apply the key aspects of Agile; pair programming, test driven development and refactoring
• Why introduce pair programming?
• Dealing with objections
• The dos and don'ts of pair programming
• Hands-on experience of pair programming
• Experience of writing tests and then coding against them using the
• well-known testing framework JUnit.
• identify the benefits of refactoring
• transform the way you write software by getting hands-on experience of these three important techniques

Day 1

Lesson 1 Introduction to Test Driven Development

Lesson 2 Test Driven Development - a worked example

Lesson 3 Working with the JUnit testing framework

Lesson 4 Why use pair programming?

Day 2

Lesson 1 Hands on experience of pair programming

Lesson 2 Principles and benefits of refactoring

Lesson 3 Worked example of refactoring

Lesson 4 Test-Driven Development, Pair Programming and Refactoring, putting it all together