A Journey toward sustained agility.

magine shipping software early and often, and sustaining the pace as it matures. Imagine harnessing "Change" as a catalyst for opportunity.

Software Engineering can be extremely difficult and maddening. But it doesn’t have to be. We'll take a look at the various challenges we face and explore practical ways to overcome them, to answer this question:

Can we put ourselves in a position to ship code earlier and more often?

Toward answering this question, we will explore 5 areas:

* Bad Code vs Agility – What it means to be “Agile” and the impact of Bad Code on Agility.
* Better Code: Enablers – Enabling Concepts for Better Code such as TDD, Clean Code and Patterns, with an eye toward adapting them to various programming paradigms such as Functional and OOP.
* Empowering OOP – If OOP is to be chosen as a paradigm, we’ll explore what it means to play to the strengths of this paradigm.
* Web Application Architectures: When building Web Applications, we’ll explore various architectures that may hinder or promote a sustainable business fueled by better code.
* TDD: Better Fuels Faster – Leveraging preceding topics, we’ll put it all together in describing a workflow leveraging test-driven development for shipping better products ... faster, while delighting our customers.

The end of this talk will showcase code examples of a real-world Kata for building the service layer of a “Ride Hailing Application”. It will also link to recorded Kata videos, as well as a “clean slate” branch in my git repository to follow along. If you wish to take an early look at these videos, they are all available here: http://bit.ly/tdd-vids

Having made this case, we’ll conclude with the positive impact this workflow will have on a team’s ability to ship new products and new features at a sustained pace, with high levels of predictability.

While PHP, Symfony and Doctrine are used for code examples, concepts in this talk are applicable to all PHP frameworks and environments, as well as other programming languages such as Java and C#.