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.

A great team builds great software, but how do you build a great team?

Let's move beyond getting lucky and look at some key practices that will help you build your scattered cats into a well-oiled machine.

Subversion is a free source code management system that's very powerful.

We'll cover the basic Subversion topics, starting with installation, so that you can use it yourself.

An overview of the Agile software approach from the book Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects.

This book provides a comprehensive look at the software life cycle and can be used to retool the way you, and your team, builds software. While we can't cover the entire book in nintey minutes, we can look how a holistic view of the software life cycle helps you improve your projects and makes your life easier.

Continuous Integration is increasingly recognized as a vital practice in an Agile software shop. Traditionally it's been difficult to set up and administer. Today, that's no longer the case.

We'll look at Cruise Control, a popular CI package. We'll start with the "quick-start" binary release, then change the set up to point to our own project. When we're done, you'll be able to set up your own Cruise Control install on Monday morning.

How do you keep a team scattered across time zones in sync?

It's difficult to keep a local team coordinated. When we add geographical distance to the equation, problems are immediately magnified. We'll talk about techniques that you can use to be sure everyone is sharing information and on the same page whether they're in the same office or in different time zones.