Agile 2008 - we'll be there!

We are finalising our work for Agile 2008. I led two teams that submitted two sessions at the conference this August in Toronto, Canada. We had them accepted and the two papers will be published in the proceedings. We're now in the process of writing a summary of the sessions for the conference agenda. Here they follow

What's in the toolbox of a successful software craftsman?
Have you ever wanted to know which tools a big distributed team of successful software craftsman use to implement their user stories? How they configure them to support agile development based on XP and Scrum and deliver to the agreed plan? This session will answer these questions and more. Three representatives of this team will tell you what’s in their toolbox and how the toolbox supports four core agile practices that the team adopts to succeed: maximum project status visibility, effective communication, immediate feedback and ruthless automation.

Pushing the boundaries of testing and Continuous Integration
In this session, three representatives of an agile team will show how an automated build that executes robustness, scalability and performance tests helped them drastically improve the quality of their highly concurrent application server. They will also show how the team configured such builds in their continuous integration environment as well as what performance and robustness metrics they monitored. Finally, the team will show how valuable and effective this investment has been for capturing bugs and performance-related issues very early in their development process.

I look forward to get there: I'll hopefully meet people I already had the chance to talk to in the past (Kent Beck and JB) and people I only recently had the honour to collaborate with (Ron Jeffries and Manfred Lange - who reviewed our papers for the conference).

I'll keep you posted!