One of the key activities within agile development is continuous planning. Using short feedback cycles the whole team will be able to improve the estimates and help the customer to understand what his or her requirements really are.

This will make the planning more and more precise over time and allows for strategic software development and risk reduction.

After a short presentation, participants will experience how this can be done in practice. This simulation will illustrate agile estimation methods, the concept of (development) velocity and as well continuous learning via retrospectives.

From a user perspective, the IT industry has a lousy reputation. The IT department consistently delivers late, if we deliver at all. We often hear that this isn't what the user wanted, or asked for, or that it isn't fit for purpose. It's too slow, it's the wrong colour, people don't do it like that any more - the market has moved on.

Behaviour-driven development (BDD) is an attempt to address this situation. With roots in agile software delivery, behavioural psychology and learning theory, BDD brings together everyone involved in the software lifecycle: users, developers, testers, analysts and the poor operations and systems folk who have to support our systems. It breaks away from the us-and-them mentality to create a shared understanding between business and technical people.

This workshop introduces BDD over four sessions, showing how it works, and more importantly why it works. It also shows how you can start using BDD successfully on your own projects and deliver software that matters to your business.

Session 1: Agile Software Delivery (80 mins)

Why are we so poor at writing software that is fit for purpose? Even when we deliver something, we often find it doesn't solve the original business objective. This session looks at how the IT industry has grown up around engineering principles that tie us in to unhelpful development practices. It introduces the principles of agile software delivery, that allow us to react to changing requirements and information, based on feedback and open communication.

Session 2: How BDD works (80 mins)

Behaviour-driven development is a "second generation" agile methodology. It freely borrows from established, successful approaches such as test-driven development, domain-driven design, acceptance test-driven planning and other proven practices, bringing them under a single, holistic framework. This session introduces BDD as an "outside-in" methodology - starting from the business objective and only writing software that helps meet that objective.

Session 3: Why BDD works (80 mins)

BDD grew out of the challenges I was facing as a coach on agile software teams. From a non-technical perspective, its roots are in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), behavioural psychology, learning theory and life coaching. This session explores some of these themes and explains why BDD works and how it evolved.

Session 4: Introducing BDD to your team (80 mins)

This session is about how change works, and how to introduce change into your team or organisation in a sustainable way. Different people react differently to change. This session explores why this happens and provides you with techniques to introduce BDD into your working environment in a way that will support and encourage your team members.

Retrospective

We will spend some time at the end of the day reviewing what we have learned.

Over the years, the Open Source Spring Framework has grown into the de-facto standard for doing Enterprise Java Development. While developing Spring, we have learned valuable lessons about successful framework design. In this session, we are going to share these lessons.

The session will take the form of a number of freestanding items, each showing one specific rule for designing a good framework.

Patterns, antipatterns, organizational tricks and code samples are described in a pragmatic fashion.

 is a senior enterprise application architect with more than ten years' experience in commercial software environments. Three years ago, Arjen started to specialise in Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures. During this period he has conducted trainings and has researched SOAs in large organisations.

Arjen is the founder and the project lead for the Spring Web Services. Arjen has also contributed to various other open source projects, including XFire, NEO and others.

Curious about Test-Driven Development? Heard a lot about it, but never had a chance to really try it?

This tutorial will give you hands-on experience with Test-Driven Development in C# or VB.NET.

Bring your laptop with Visual Studio 2005 installed and you'll get a real Test-Driven kick-start! We will provide you with the additional tools/frameworks you'll need. You will get a feeling for what it's like to make changes to a system that has a lot of tests (no more "this looks ugly, but I don't have the guts to change it"). You'll also experience how writing test code before writing the production code changes the way you think about and design your production code. The tutorial will introduce you to Test-Driven Development, refactoring, unit-testing frameworks, and mock frameworks.

You'll have the opportunity to try these for yourself in C# or VB.NET, with the presenter helping out and answering your questions.

 is first and foremost a developer with more than 20 years of experience. He has also written the books ".Net Enterprise Design" and "Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns".