Laurie Williams

Professor, NC State; Agile Trainer/Coach; Author "Pair Programming Illuminated"

Laurie is an agile trainer, coach and mentor. She is the lead author of the book Pair Programming Illuminated. In 2001, she was one of the founders of the first agile conference in the US, XP Universe, which has evolved and been renamed to the large Agile 20xx conference.

Laurie is a professor in the computer science department at North Carolina State University. She has been researching agile teams and practices for more than ten years and has published over 30 papers on her experiences with agile teams and teams using the pair programming and test-driven development practices. She has received three teaching awards, at the department, university, and international level.

Laurie has an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering and graduate degrees in business and computer science. She worked for IBM for more than nine years before pursuing a second career as a professor, researcher, and consultant.

Laurie can be reached at laurie.williams@gmail.com.

Presentations

Hands on Planning Poker

Agile teams often use planning poker for the "whole team" to collaboratively estimate the overall effort to implementing a release-ready feature. Through planning poker, teams also gain a greater understanding of the requirement, set expectations for the feature implementation, share implementation hints, and conduct high-level design and architecture discussions.

This session will introduce planning poker and will include a hands-on planning poker session.

Agile Release Planning: Preparing the release vision

With agile, management and customers can be concerned that there is no vision of what will be included in a release -- they'll just get what they get when a predetermined number of timeboxed "iterations" have expired. Rather, agile release planning involves the creation of a release vision by determining, prioritizing, and estimating the major pieces of desired functionality for a release and by determining how long it will take to complete this functionality.

This session will include an introduction to agile release planning. It will also include hands on exercises for prioritizing the functionality that will be included in a release.

Test-driven Development: Have teams found the practice beneficial?

With the test-driven development practice, software engineering write automated unit test code as they write implementation code -- on a minute by minute basis. Have the engineers and teams who have used the test driven development practice benefited from all this testing?

This session will involve sharing research results of engineering who have practiced test-driven development. Audience members will also be encouraged to share their experiences.