On Tuesday night Pivotal Labs NY hosted the first “Agile Show & Tell”, organized by the Agile Experience Design Meetup. More after the fold…

The evening started off with Ben Woosley and myself giving a brief tour of the Pivotal Labs Agile practice, culminating with a discussion of how we integrate UX. Ben and I sketched out a quick talk earlier in the day and then converted it to html slides using the excellent Slidedown. When an early show-of-hands from the audience indicated that most of them weren’t familiar with Pivotal Tracker, we stopped our slides and dove right into Tracker, demonstrating the basics to a sea of mostly nodding heads. A conversation followed with a number of great questions, including discussions of automated design testing, integrating design velocity and development velocity, and the finer points of pair-programming. I’m looking forward to continuing this conversation as the Agile Experience Design meetup continues.

After the Pivotal presentation, a few group members came up and gave short talks. Lane Halley gave a brief overview of the upcoming Agile Alliance convention in Chicago. Lar Van Der Jagt gave a great demo explaining Test-Driven Development using Cucumber, a testing framework that lets users write in pretty-close-to-plain-English, which looks something like this:

and Pickler, which synchronizes user stories between Pivotal Tracker and Cucumber via the command line.

Finally, Jeff Gothelf talked about the journey from waterfall to Agile and gave a great illustration of the use of wikified style guides to aid in the transition and streamline communication between developers and designers.

Thanks to the speakers, the attendees, the organizers, and especially the UX Workshop for livestreaming the whole event!