Drew McManus of Road 3 shares his advice on managing agile projects. Drew describes when and how much to plan, the right way to share the plan, and how to keep the product and the engineering team properly focused while not losing the grand vision.

Elisabeth Hendrickson of Quality Tree Software demonstrates live exploratory testing on Pivotal’s own Tracker application.

Pivots Josh Susser and Damon McCormick share their experiences scaling a Rails app with a Postgres backend. Learn optimization techniques and how Postgres differs from MySQL when tuning a Rails application.

Lightning talks emceed by Bosco So.

Presenters: Jeff Smick – Blather: simple XMPP; Tim Connor – Rack Middleware; Wolfram Arnold – Cache Money; Yehuda Katz – Moneta; Andy Delcambre – DataMapper adapters; Erik Michaels-Ober – Merb admin console; Mislav Marohnić – autotest and rspactor; Bryan Helmkamp – Rack::Bug; Pat Nakajima – Slidedown; Chris Lee – Floxee; Max Horbul – PiMP

This talk introduces two symbiotic libraries that leverage properties of the relational algebra to enable elegant client/server web applications. On the server, there’s Unison, with an API similar to ActiveRecord’s, but more general. In addition to has_many and friends, Unison adds relates_to_many and relates_to_one, allowing custom associations to be constructed through the composition of relational operators. For the browser there is June, which offers a JavaScript version of the same API, along with a relational object-store, through which clients can securely pull arbitrary datasets from a Unison-based server, treating it like a relational database. We’ll also explore the nexus of the relational model with event-driven programming and the actor model of concurrent computation.

Just as Rails did for web development, the Arduino project combines powerful layers of abstraction with sensible defaults, making it easy to build hardware devices that sense and manipulate the physical world. So easy that artists, social workers, scientists, and even simple web programmers who lack electrical engineering degrees can do it.

The Ruby Arduino Development project attempts to extend these virtues by bringing the beauty and power of Ruby to the Arduino platform. RAD compiles Ruby scripts for execution on the Arduino microcontroller development board. In addition to the syntactic elegance and simplicity gained by getting to program in Ruby instead of C++, RAD provides a set of declarative Rails-like conventions and helpers that reduce boilerplate and simplify often-byzantine hardware APIs.

Webrat, a Ruby DSL for interaction with web applications, changes the acceptance testing ROI equation. By implementing an invisible, fast browser simulator you can use from within your test framework of choice (Test::Unit, RSpec, Shoulda or Cucumber), it sidesteps most of Selenium’s drawbacks while retaining the coverage value.

This talk, delivered by the maintainer of Webrat, will describe the value of acceptance testing for Rails apps, common pitfalls, and Webrat’s solutions. We’ll look at techniques for writing maintainable acceptance tests, and maximizing their value over the lifespan of an application. Finally, we’ll explore advanced techniques like applying Webrat to ease some of the pain of in-browser testing when it can’t be avoided (JavaScript/AJAX, primarily).

In August of 2008, Jacqui Maher visited Baobab Health in Lilongwe, Malawi. Baobab is a dedicated group of programmers, clinicians and administrators developing public health and patient data administration systems. They use a variety of hardware and software technologies, but their main applications are written in Ruby on Rails.

Shoes is a tiny graphics toolkit that embeds ruby. It allows you to do anything. You can draw squares and circles and they can move about and say “Good Morning” when they chance upon each other. Shoes lets you add layouts to your applications with ease. It borrows ideas from Processing, Lua, and HTML to make an intuitive language to convert your ideas into programs that you can share with your friends.

Learn about the architecture and construction of CloudKit, an Open Web JSON Appliance. Along the way, see how the emerging Open Stack — including OpenID and OAuth+Discovery — can be used to build open and discoverable web services in Ruby. Other topics of exploration will include cooperative Rack middleware stacks, non-relational storage with Tokyo Cabinet, new IETF drafts covering HTTP Discovery, online/offline synchronization with plain old HTTP, and more.