Rails Improv at Agile 2007 Conference

Dave, Matt, and I will be presenting a Rails/Agile workshop at the Agile 2007 Conference. The conference will be held in Washington DC, our home town. We are pretty excited.

Having fun with Rails and Agile Development

Agile software development brought fun back into building software by introducing light-weight approaches to team communications and customer collaboration. Delivering working software and learning new technologies made us happy. In spring of 2005, an open-source web application framework called Ruby on Rails (RoR) was introduced to minimize tedious aspects of web application development. This framework allows a developer to focus on application’s business logic, interact with customers frequently, and reduced the cost of changes. The Agile community quickly embraced the new framework as evidenced by one of the best selling technical books titled Agile Web Development with Rails (by Dave Thomas, David Hansson, Leon Breedt, and Mike Clark). The RoR framework abandons traditional heavy-weight assumptions and encourages simple, creative interfaces. Good looking, easy-to-use applications make the users happy, which makes developers happy. In this workshop, we go beyond the buzz by interactively demonstrating key elements of Rails framework. Then, we will have a group discussion/debate on if (or how) this framework enables project teams to be more agile. We will end the workshop by improvisational development of features requested by the workshop participants.