About this Workshop
This workshop teaches the value of small, reversible steps in Product Development.

Product development is risky. One of the revolutionary breakthroughs of Agile teams — and of XP (Extreme Programming) in particular — is the practice of always keeping the product in a releasable condition while adding functionality in small, reversible steps.
2 Hours of non-stop hands-on fun. A series of Lego® challenges illustrate the importance and benefits of incremental development, refactoring, and simplicity.

The workshop also teaches the Test Driven Development pattern — no experience necessary! We’ll use Lego® challenges to experience Test Driven Development. You will write actual tests and build a product incrementally. (A small product, but the concept scales to large systems.) This is a perfect illustration for managers who want to understand the value of Test Driven Development and Continuous Delivery.
This curriculum is adapted from the excellent exercises published and made freely available by Mike Bowler. He explains:
Most of these exercises have been jointly developed by Mike Bowler of Gargoyle Software and Bryan Beecham of Iceberg Ideas. All of these are used by Mike and Bryan in classes they teach and conference sessions they’ve given around the world. Bryan created the original TDD and Refactoring exercises and then together they created even more. The collaboration exercise was heavily influenced by Ellen Grove of Agile Partnership (though I do not include that exercise in the online version of this workshop).
Their work produced insightful and fun exercises — I have adapted those exercises for online delivery and enhanced the experience with my own additional content.
Course Topics
- Test Driven Development cycle
- Refactoring versus rework
- Focus on quality
- Pairing
- Incremental design & development
- Experimentation
- Simple design
- Testing
Who Should Attend?
I’ve conducted the workshop for Development Managers, Architects, Designers, Product Owners, Business Analysts, Testers, and programmers.
This workshop is primarily for people involved with project delivery or product development. And, broadly speaking, the concepts are applicable in the management of complex problems and empirical process control.