Scott Bellware is a software product designer, developer, and agile coach living in Austin, TX. Scott teaches agile development practices and software production methodologies in workshops in the US and Canada. Scott is the founder of the AgileATX community of agile software practitioners in Austin. He is the organizer of the ALT.NET Open Space and Continuous Improvement conferences in Austin. Scott is a recipient of Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional award.

"Testing is design"; "Unit tests are documentation"; "Tests are specifications". These are sought-after rewards of developer testing practices, but simply writing tests or even writing tests before writing production code doesn't make these wishes come true. When we take up unit testing, we initially tend to do things a certain way. Over time we might adopt test-driven development, mock-objects, and ultimately we might adopt the specification and design practices that lead to the lauded benefits of self-documenting code, design through test, and ultimately to a greater level of agility. This presentation walks through some of the principal phases of evolving basic testing skills toward sustainable agility through test-driven, client-driven, and behavior-driven programming, touching on unit-testing, mock objects, test-driven development, behavior-driven development, and domain-specific languages for testing.

While Agile methods have enabled organizations to understand and to adopt more disciplined software development practices, Agile can be taken advantage of by software teams in ways that can lead to less desirable results and even project failure. This presentation tells the story of an agile project staffed with veteran agile practitioners that failed catastrophically, and the principals found in Lean Software Development that helped explain the failure, as well as ways to avoid the same failures in the future.