Testing has always been the less glamorous sister to software development, scarcely noticed outside the industry, and the object of complaints inside. If some small error is missed, testing is to blame; if time is running short or costs are getting too high, testing is likely to be starved of resources. When combined with these attitudes, the dependency on the existing test infrastructure means that the idea of changing any part of the testing process makes engineers and managers drag their feet unless they can clearly see the value.

The newly released patterns & practices guided addresses the costs and pain points traditionally involved in testing by contrasting the more conventional test approach employed by Contoso with the new approach Fabrikam takes using the Visual Studio 2012 RC testing infrastructure.

• Starting at standup / taskboard
• My Work and Suspend & Resume
• Unit testing love / fakes / playlists / etc
• Code review

• Creates (reasonably) fixed teams to establish predictability in estimating,
• Adopts a Money for Nothing and Changes for Free type of commercial approach,
• Deals with emergent vs existing architecture
• Deals with risk of ending in the Avalanche anti pattern with enterprise level scrum
• Develops a strategy when to do scrum and not to scrum

This session looks at how to create usable contracts that can support this flexibility.

Mark and James share their perspectives on:

• Which agile practices have been adopted onsite
• How can offshore support onsite
• How to integrate onsite and offshore tools, training, coaching, and process definition

This session aims to explore different ends of the spectrum of Agile testing practices and how it applies to different kinds of teams. Using Visual Studio Test Professional, its Quarterly Updates, and partner products, we'll walk through multiple flavors of Agile testing and how your teams can adopt the practices that work for you.

This session will focus on Finning Canada experiences, lessons learned and the impact on their business in terms of delivering value, innovation, improved quality and increased customer satisfaction on their transformational road toward increasing agility.

Software developers, the people responsible for this world changing software, are increasingly becoming empowered, making decisions about what tools they use, how they work and even what devices they work on. But if software is now so important to the business, its management may even be more critical. ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) is the discipline that describes the application of business management to the practice of software development from idea to delivery. Empowered developers, or developer popularism enforces a fundamental change to ALM. Changing it from a single process, single tool based model to something more complex. In this guest view, Mik & Dave will describe why developer popularism is happening, what that means to developers, and how developers need to engage with their management and other constituents in the software value chain to ensure that ALM continues to work. If successful, we have the opportunity to reach a nirvana state: allowing management oversight with developer freedom.

This session will answer that question using an approach which integrates testers with all roles into your agile practices using Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server.

• Making sure that the deployment pipeline practices are in place
• Supporting the different stages in the pipeline (commit, automated acceptance test, manual test, release, etc.) for propagating the commits, using TFS artifacts such as build definitions and custom build templates
• The set of tools that can be useful to perform the activities involved in each stage (building, automated and manual testing of different kinds, environment set up, deployment, etc.), and how these tools are used or invoked within the pipeline
• How to use the reporting capabilities of TFS to show a commit status matrix, or how any change (commit) is propagating through the different stages of the pipeline, and the overall status of the pipeline

Your team thinks "backlog" and your bosses think "project plan." How do you make it work? How do you ensure communication and foster trust between the two groups? How do you bridge the project management impedance mismatch? You need to find a way get everybody to 'play nice' so they can do their jobs.

In this session, we'll drill into the details of the project management impedance mismatch and talk about strategies to improve communication and delivery when you need to make Agile work inside a Waterfall-centric organization.

The Arab Spring swept across Northern Africa and the Middle East in 2011, bringing about dramatic changes in the governing authorities. In Egypt, the revolution changed the regime, and the Military Council took over to restore order, and to call for a fair election where the nation chooses its new president. The election committee was under pressure to facilitate a system that would support transparent and fair elections.

With only a team of 6, including three developers, a limited budget, and about one month to develop the application that scales up to 55 million eligible electors, the team tried to utilize some important ALM practices that were of a great help. The team knew that the choice of the practices and tools would be critical to the success of the project. Testing the load of the system in an accurate and realistic way, and speeding up the development cycle were the name of the game in this critical mission. The team was particularly concerned about how to build for, and to handle, the load those applications that would experience in a very tight time window. Only one shot was there then, and the world was watching.

In this session, Ahmed will talk in more details about that critical load testing mission, which in its turn derived other Agile practices. How was it planned for? How was it implemented using Visual Studio ALM? What were the practices that were of a great help in achieving the goal? and What were the best lessons learned?

But before jumping into the story, we will go through an essential background of load testing

You will learn:

• Why traditional software contracts are a barrier to Agility
• The basics principles that should underly *any* agile sourcing initiative
• Why a legally enforceable contract may not be accepted
• Which aspects are important to consider in a contract that supports Agility
• Common Agile Contracting pitfalls to avoid
• How to talk about Agile contracts to lawyers and customers
• The underlying hazards in Agile Contracting that nobody seems to be talking about

Continuing on from the landmark Agile 2009 session "The Prisoner's Dilemma: Using Game Theory to Understand the problem of Agile Contracting" - this session continues to take a Systems approach to the Agile Contracting problem; extending and updating the original premis by blending in the most recent developements in not only Agile, but Behavioral Economics, Game Theory, Social Complexity and Psychology, to help practitioners of every level improve their Agile Sourcing Scenarios.

Leffingwell is the creator of the Scaled Agile Framework, and author of Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise, and Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises.