Monday, August 3, I had the opportunity to give a talk at the Agile Alliance’s Agile 2015 conference in Washington, D.C. My first conference in the US, and it was absolutely fantastic to be able to meet so many people I’d only interacted with on mailing lists and twitter. It was also a huge conference, with about 17 concurrent tracks and 2200 participants. I’m sure I’ve missed meeting as many people as I did manage to find in those masses. 
Even with that many tracks, though, there were still plenty of people that showed up for my talk on Monday afternoon. So many that we actually had to turn people away. This is great, I’ve never been a fire hazard before. I was a bit worried beforehand. With my talk dealing with issues of refactoring, rebuild and legacy code, it was a little unnerving to be programmed against Michael Feathers…
My talk is about how we have so much difficulty teaching well known and proven techniques from XP, such as TDD and ATDD, and some of the evolved ones like Continuous Delivery. And that the reason for that could be that these things are so much more difficult to do when working with legacy systems. Especially if you’re still learning the techniques! At the very least, it’s much more scary.
I then discuss, grounded in the example of a project at the VNU/Pergroep Online Services, how using an architectural approach such as the Strangler Pattern, combined with process rules from XP and Continuous Delivery, can allow even a team new to them to surprisingly quickly adopt these techniques and grow in proficiency along with their new code.
Rebuilding. Kinda.
Slides
The slides of my talk are available on slideshare, included below.