Are your product designs hit or miss? Do you have trouble building a loosely coupled system? Is your code incestuous? Refactoring not an option with your code base? Tracer Bullets help keep your project out of the fire.

Tracer Bullet Development:

* helps you create great software
* lends itself to an iterative cycle
* can be used for demos early and often
* is easily refactored
* allows your teams to work in parallel
* makes a very testable system

Tracer Bullets can coexist with nearly any other development methodology. Come see how easy it is!

a.. Do you spend more time fighting your tools than writing code? b.. Do you avoid merging your code with your teammates because of “Integration Hell”? c.. Do the same bugs keep sneaking back into your product? d.. Do your builds depend on the roll of the dice?

A good set of infrastructure tools can go a long way toward smoothing out these and other problems. Come see how to make your toolset work seamlessly in the background so you can Just Work. We'll cover source code management (SCM), build scripts, automated test harnesses, automatic builds, feature tracking and issue tracking.

As part of the session, we'll set up Subversion, create a project, and then add code for the SCM section ... just to obliterate the "it takes too much time to set up and use" argument. For build scripts, we'll add an Ant script. Let's throw in a few JUnits to demonstrate test automation, and then I'll put it all together in CruiseControl. The live demo will include breaking the build, then breaking the JUnit test, and then finally fixing it and seeing it all work.

For this first session, we'll look at Subversion, Ant, and start the Cruise Control discussion.

Throughout our software careers we learn habits from our coworkers, from books we've read, and occasionally, from conferences we attend. Much of our competence comes from the tips and tricks we pick up as we go.

In this session, learn five of the techniques I've borrowed along the way. We'll discuss The List, code reviews, code change notifications, daily meetings, and tech leads. These techniques are often abused, but when used properly they can make a huge difference in how you develop software. Take this opportunity to add these practices to your toolkit.