How do we get developers to let go of their ego and do what’s best for the customer? How do we encourage an environment where developers do not hold code sacrilegious and feel free to refactor or delete code? This session will go over strategies for teams to embrace YAGNI and celebrate the purging of dead code. For the majority of the presentation I will talk about how a team I was on came to produce a 500+ page “Big Book Of Dead Code” off of a legacy application. Producing this book reduced build times, reduced bugs, and became rallying point for developers. It’s very existence helped encourage simple design and clean code. It also spawned a competition amongst developers to see who could add more to the book. I will also talk about how this powerful visualization helped to change the way the business itself thought about code, planning, and quality. I would expect this presentation to be of benefit to almost everyone involved in software development but especially for anyone struggling with trying to introduce agile and TDD to a legacy application. I have presented at various Iowa technology related user groups and IT departments. I have also been involved with the Hyperstream project from the Technology Association of Iowa. This is a project where local technologists work with high school and middle school students on projects that benefit the school and the community. The goal of the project is to encourage young people to purse careers in technology. This goes beyond just programming and includes art and design, marketing, business, and science. I work directly with students as a mentor on a weekly basis and I help the students present their projects to school boards and the community. My style is pretty loose and I try to keep the group engaged by not overloading on too much raw data at once. If you are looking for Agile Alliance reviewers who have worked with me and can give you a feel for my style please talk to Tim Ottinger or Brandon Carlson. This is a new presentation but some of the content can be found in these two blog posts: http://ryber.tumblr.com/post/4745553646/the-big-book-of-dead-code http://ryber.tumblr.com/post/11716935907/night-of-the-undead-code
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/DeadCodePresentation.pdf
