At NCR we have taken infrastructure changes and turned them into software changes tracked with Git, promoted through CI with TeamCity, and pushed into the Data Center with Chef. In this talk I'll walk through our workflow for managing changes this way and how to implement the changes in a repeatable, secure fashion.

Michael Hedgpeth

Technical Excellence Doesn't Just Happen

Allison Pollard

The ninth principle from the Agile Manifesto states that technical excellence enhances agility, but when the codebase is ugly and the deadlines are tight, most teams don’t choose to refactor mercilessly, adopt TDD, or evaluate automated testing tools—unless they have the proper support. In our experience working with multiple teams in a single codebase, developers can feel victim to a legacy codebase if only a few people are writing clean code or refactoring; guiding them on how to decrease technical debt while delivering their projects helps "unstuck" their other agile practices. We will talk about the challenges we’ve seen with Product Owners, Managers, and Scrum Masters interacting with teams at various stages of agile+technical excellence and how a focus on technical practices sparked a wider interest in craftsmanship. Learn how can you influence the team towards the right practices while fostering their sense of ownership. Getting serious about technical excellence requires support from technical and non-technical roles, and we’ll share how we partnered as coaches to help an organization through a technical turnaround with some tips for others who need to do the same. This session has been presented at the DFW Scrum user group and at the Agile 2015 conference in Washington, DC.

Cultivating a habit of using Test Driven Development is hard to do with the momentum and pace of many of todays fast paced languages. With Go (golang) this is not the case, testing is a first class citizen which makes is a great way to learn the language with a test first mind set. Learning in this manner we are able to leverage a child like approach and gamification to stay engaged with our code. In this talk we will cover a basic TDD work flow and leverage this foundation to ramp up our knowledge of this curious language we call go.

James Pieper

When adopting new frameworks and practices that challenge old habits or beliefs, individuals often get stuck. And when individuals are stuck, it can lead to entire teams or organizations getting stuck. How do you move beyond what’s worked in the past? Can you reinvigorate people to combat complacency and apathy? What does it mean to change the mindset of an entire organization? In this session, we’ll talk about what we’ve done as Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches to change hearts and minds to embrace change and continuous improvement. Find out how we’ve helped people get un-stuck and fostered an agile organizational mindset at the individual, team, and organization levels through training, mentoring, and coaching. This session will be presented at the Thomson Reuters Beyond the Edge conference on September 23, 2015.

Allison Pollard

Your code is right. Other people are just using it wrong! Learn 6 simple techniques to prevent people from using your code incorrectly. We'll apply those techniques to a class in the .NET Framework that is really easy to get wrong. By the time we're done, you'll have to try really hard to mess it up. Some APIs will throw exceptions when you get something wrong. That's not helpful! I'll show you how to write an API that guides you toward correct code. It won't even compile unless you get it right. These 6 techniques are built into the C# language today, so take advantage of them! Everybody on your team will thank you. And you'll spend less time fixing their bugs.

Michael Perry

Functional Programming in F#

Jeremy Bellows

The world operates in functions. Everyday we perform numerous small tasks that lead to some kind of output. That output is then used as an input to another task to produce a different output. Functional Programming is the practice of slicing a problem into smaller consumable units of work so that the connections of inputs to outputs can be pictured simply.

UI Automation has become increasingly important as web applications become richer. As your test suite becomes larger it can become more difficult to grow and maintain. This talk will cover all of the tips and best practices that I have learned over the past 4 years doing UI Automation.

Chris Holt

Ok, you're a web developer. The whole point of your existence is to push angle brackets to your user in a secure, predictable, consistent and fast way. And to do that, you have the best tools money can buy (or your boss can afford). But do you know the hidden gems of the tools embedded in your browser? There's loads of things to help you get the most of your precious work hours by debugging code, styling and performance issues. Come to this talk to find out the secrets that browser developers don't want you to know. Ok, maybe they do want you to know them.

Justin Self

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