Agile processes work better if developers and customers have specific aptitudes and attitudes, such as the ability and willingness to handle rapid change. Members of an agile product team cannot always be selected to ensure that they innately possess these capabilities. Developers may not appreciate the need for unit testing. Customers may not be able to interact easily to create just-in-time requirements. You must adapt your agile implementation so that team members can work effectively within their capabilities. In this interactive class, participants first outline people issues they have faced. Based on common issues, the class self-selects into small groups to discuss their challenges in more depth. Each group develops ways to approach these issues and improve their teams. At the end, groups share their key results with the whole class.

In Behavior Driven Development (BDD), you write behavioral tests of an application just-in-time, one test at a time to express its design. You can take a BDD approach to a database schema in the same way. Scott Ambler presents the Behavior Driven Database Design (BDDD) technique. He explains its relationship to Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD) and how it fits into agile software development in general. Find out how to refactor a database by applying simple changes that improve the design without changing its semantics. Create a comprehensive regression test suite to validate your database on a regular basis, ideally whenever a change is made to the database schema itself or when the database is accessed in a new way. Go even further and implement continuous database integration where the database is automatically rebuilt and retested whenever its schema changes.

Once your agile project is rolling, there are still many bumps and roadblocks-any one of which can derail the train. Whether you are leading the project formally or informally, there are a variety of useful techniques to keep the project alive and innovative. David Hussman shares his coaching approach and techniques for growing and maintaining sustainable agile communities. David starts by reviewing basics that must be in place and then moves on to advanced techniques-maintaining a living backlog, adapting to change, growing meaningful metrics, radiating information, working with project members, anti-coaching, and more. He also discusses a collection of useful monitors-spontaneous pairing, "us" and "them", presence of pride, emergence of leaders-to determine when to effectively employ one or more of the coaching techniques.

Developer practices for traditional and agile Java development are well understood and documented. But dynamic languages--Groovy, Ruby, and others--change the ground rules. Many of the common practices, refactoring techniques, and design patterns we have been taught either no longer apply or should be applied differently. In addition, some new techniques can come into play to improve your development. Join Paul King as he discusses and demonstrates new and modified techniques for agile development with dynamic languages, including closure refactoring, better ways to implement the delegation pattern, rules for creating domain specific languages (DSLs), and the pros and cons of static and dynamic typing. Paul further explains the impact of dynamic programming on dependency injection, immutability, aspects, mocking approaches, and interface-oriented design.