Design & Develop

In the new economy, cliches such as "Internet time" can be disastrous. As the market emphasis shifts from first-to-market to first-to-profit, Internet start-ups are forced to scrutinize decisions which directly impact their business model. Learn the steps to failure taken by one dot-com company and the lessons learned from this failed endeavor. Explore the executive decisions made to speed time-to-market and customer acquisition, and discover how product schedules are adversely affected by attempts to retrofit an architecture and introduce tools.

Are you looking for a way to effectively set the expectations of senior management? The Functional Readiness Matrix (FRM) is a decision-making tool that offers a simple way to represent test progress based on the functional areas or features of an application. By enabling the test team to track actual test progress against the implementation goals established early on, the FRM allows for the presentation of valid test metrics to management in a way they can understand.

Everyone pays lip service to the importance of unit testing, but rarely do developers actually integrate unit testing into their daily routine. In the spirit of eXtreme Programming, this presentation offers a simple two-class framework for automating unit tests in three popular languages: C++, Java, and C. No GUI, no templates, just a fast and productive way of organizing and running suites of unit tests. You'll walk away wondering how you have done without this simple technique for so long.

If you want a higher quality product in an eXtreme Programming (XP) project, you must be prepared to pay a higher price. We make decisions and compromises based on quality versus cost every day. Extreme programming teams are driven to do their best work, but customers have the right to specify and pay for only the level of quality they require. This presentation explores ways to resolve these two potentially conflicting points of view.