Keynote

The Engineering Side of Agile

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01:40:59

EOC 2025

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James Grenning

James Grenning's trains, coaches and consults worldwide. James' mission is to bring modern technical and management practices to product development teams, especially embedded systems development. He is the author of Test-Driven Development for Embedded C (https://wingman-sw.com/tddec). He is a co-author of CppUTest, a popular unit test harness for embedded C and C++ (http://cpputest.org). He invented Planning Poker, an estimating technique used around the world, and participated in the creation of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (https://agilemanifesto.org/). His website is https://wingman-sw.com.

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Topics Covered

Testing Agile/Processes Team Management Software Design

Keynote

The Engineering Side of Agile

James Grenning

01:40:59 EOC 2025

James Grenning

01:40:59

It’s no surprise—Agile is often misunderstood as little more than two-week sprints, burn-down charts, and daily stand-up meetings. In reality, Agile isn’t a micro-management framework; it’s a mindset rooted in continuous improvement and technical excellence.

When Extreme Programming (XP) emerged in 1999 with its provocative name, it challenged the status quo with sound engineering practices designed to support tight iterative cycles. Yet today, many Agile teams struggle to integrate these practices, leading to poor product quality, hard-to-change code, endless debugging, long stabilization phases, and the growing burden of manual testing.

In this keynote, we’ll cut through the noise to uncover why Technical Excellence is the cornerstone of successful Agile teams. You’ll discover how XP practices like test-driven development, refactoring, and automation can address the hidden challenges of Agile and set your team on the path to true agility.

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According to James Grenning, why is Technical Excellence critical to successful Agile teams?

A Because Agile is primarily about ceremonies and meetings, so technical work can be deprioritized.

B Because without strong engineering practices teams produce defects and delays, preventing them from being truly Agile.

C Because certifications like Certified Scrum Master guarantee project success regardless of engineering practices.

D Because focusing only on team interactions solves technical problems automatically.

E Because outsourcing development to cheaper providers is the best way to scale Agile.

Which practice does James Grenning highlight as putting mistakes 'in your face' and reducing time spent finding defects?

A Doing all development first and testing later in a hardening sprint.

B Test-driven development: write a test, watch it fail, make it pass, refactor.

C Relying exclusively on manual exploratory testing on the target hardware.

D Writing exhaustive design documents up front to prevent any coding errors.

E Hiring more QA testers to catch bugs after feature completion.

Why does Grenning insist on automating tests instead of relying on manual testing during short iterative cycles?

A Because manual testing is always more expensive than automation regardless of project size.

B Because manual testing forces testers to think creatively, which he discourages.

C Because manual testing and repeated retesting across iterations creates an untested-code gap that doesn't scale; automation keeps regressions visible.

D Because automation allows skipping integration until the final delivery phase.

E Because automated tests replace the need to involve customers or stakeholders.

What is the purpose of the 'walking skeleton' approach Grenning describes?

A To build the entire system architecture up front before writing any features.

B To create a full-featured UI prototype that ignores core logic and integration.

C To deliver a thin end-to-end version early so integration starts on day one and risks are discovered quickly.

D To postpone integration until a dedicated integration sprint at the project's end.

E To focus only on hardware first and delay software until specifications are complete.

When Grenning proposes to 'marry the planning practices of Scrum to the technical practices of Extreme Programming', what is he recommending teams do?

A Keep Scrum meetings and cadence but ignore technical practices like TDD and refactoring because they're optional.

B Abandon Scrum entirely and only practice Extreme Programming without planning or cadence.

C Combine Scrum's planning and iterative cadence with XP's technical practices (TDD, refactoring, automation) so you have shippable code each iteration.

D Rely solely on Scrum Master certifications to solve engineering problems.

E Use two-week sprints as a micro-management tool to pressure developers into faster delivery regardless of quality.

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Upvotes Newest Oldest

nfogh

Score: 0 | 11 months ago | 1 reply

Test coverage is a terrible name. Just because of the word "coverage". It kind of tells you that this thing is covered, which it is not.
I think one should invert the meaning of test coverage. All that test coverage can tell you, is how much of your code is definitely not covered by automated tests. So 80% test coverage means is that 20% of your code are not covered by any automated tests at all.

jwgrenningSpeaker

Score: 0 | 11 months ago | no reply

We agree, I suspect, on the flaws of code coverage. 100% coverage means nothing. Low percentage means there is a lot of work to do.

Here is something I wrote about it a while ago.
https://blog.wingman-sw.com/code-coverages-mixed-message

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