Agile principles, practices and processes offer a path to sustainable development for individuals, teams and organisations. For many developers who want to focus on their craft, however, it is sometimes difficult to get a view of Agile development that is not either focused on a project management perspective or just on the practice of Test-Driven Development (TDD).

For the C# developer, an overview of the larger Agile process landscape needs to be complemented with the practical side of software craftsmanship. This ranges from understanding how Scrum can be fine tuned with Lean thinking to exploring Extreme Programming practices such as TDD and pairing.

The Agile Development in C# course is aimed at C# developers, who want to learn what Agile means for them. It introduces a number of common agile techniques and puts these into practice in labs and exercises in pairs and groups, before applying these over a series of mini-iterations. The workshop balances taught material with practice, introducing requirement techniques, lightweight modelling techniques, tracking and estimating approaches, design principles, testing practices and refactorings.

Agile Development

• Software development and change
• Agile values and principles
• Iterative and incremental development
• Visualisation of progress
• Kicking off and closing out an iteration
• The role of testing
• Modelling in an agile context
• Plan-Do-Study-Act

Common Agile Approaches

• Extreme Programming
• XP1 and XP2 practices
• Scrum
• Scrum roles, events and artefacts
• The Nokia test
• Lean Software Development
• Lean principles
• Kanban for software

Software Craftsmanship

• Code quality and development skills
• Elements of well-crafted code
• Coding guideline benefits and pitfalls
• Code sufficiency versus overdesign
• Technical debt and code smells
• Refactoring
• Programmer testing

Test-Driven Development

• Good Unit Tests (GUTs)
• Plain Ol' Unit Testing (POUT)
• Defect-Driven Testing (DDT)
• Test-Driven Development (TDD)
• Key TDD practices and the test-first cycle
• Overview of NUnit
• Behavioural testing based on propositions
• Negative test cases

Design Practice

• Agile architecture and responsive design
• Patterns thinking
• Class hierarchy design
• Acyclic dependencies
• Interface decoupling
• Transitive and external dependencies
• Test doubles
• Components with single responsibilities

Goal-Structured Requirements

• Specifying with goal-oriented scenarios
• Incremental development
• Lightweight use cases
• User stories
• User story styles and guidelines
• Prioritisation in terms of value and risk
• Estimation and tracking