There are still a few places left for the London XpDay, an event designed by practitioners for practitioners.

We’re trying the half-Open Space format again, with a day of prepared sessions (some promising experience reports this year) leading to a day of ad-hoc sessions. This means we can have a conference that’s more responsive to the needs of the attendees in the room—if I want to cover a topic I can propose a session.

And we have some interesting keynotes. Apart from Mark Striebeck, talking about scaling up some agile techniques as only Google can, we’re continuing our tradition of bringing in ”outside“ speakers to trigger discussion. We have Doron Swade (who built the calculating engine in the Science Museum) talking about Babbage, and storyteller Terry Saunders.

Nat and I will also be using the opportunity to launch our book in the UK.

This talk is about the qualities we look for in test code that keep the development “habitable.” We want to make sure the tests pull their weight by making them expressive, so that we can tell what’s important when we read them and when they fail, and by making sure they don’t become a maintenance drag themselves. We need to apply as much care and attention to the tests as we do to the production code, although the coding styles may differ. Difficulty in testing might imply that we need to change our test code, but often it’s a hint that our design ideas are wrong and that we ought to change the production code. In practice, these qualities are all related to and support each other. Test-driven development combines testing, specification, and design into one holistic activity.

I just ran it at the BBC and people seemed to like it.

If you miss this opportunity, you can always see it at QCon San Francisco.

I’m running a track at QCon in San Francisco on Friday 20th November. The topic is Technical Skills for Agile Development, and it’s about some of the technical essentials that Agile teams need to keep moving.

I’ll be presenting a session, based on material from our book, on how to live with your tests over the long term.

See you there?

Luckily for people with access to London (UK), we have a track at this year’s QCon to address just this point. “Turning on a sixpence — technical skills for Agile development” is targeted at teams that have adopted Agile and are struggling with some of the technical practices. We have a cracking programme full of people who actually know what it takes to deliver and support a system.

I’d like to say that we had great timing on this one because of our special wisdom, but a more likely explanation is that this issue is always relevant because building software really well is just hard.

P.S. On the current QCon London 2009 home page, I find myself cited in the same list as Tony Hoare, Joe Amstrong et. al. This should be treated as an amusing accident.

In the middle of today’s keynote I was suddenly struck by the range of our community. With only about 100 geeks we were talking about subjects such as type systems, coding practices, theories of categorisation, human perception, organisational structure, market analysis, and clinical psychology. And that’s before we dealt with catching up with industry gossip and general horse-trading. Remarkable.

This conference aims to showcase and champion the “hard skills”, and champion the idea of software craftsmanship and the ways in which it can be encouraged and supported in the workplace, in schools and colleges, and among the wider software development community.

Maybe it’s just a hubris, maybe craftsmanship is the wrong word, but we want to promote the idea that skill and experience (i.e. us) are of value in software development.

As the blurb on the site says, we’re returning to our “by practitioners, for practitioners” roots, so we have a more open structure this year, plus two cracking keynotes. Sign up soon for the early bird discount.

… and yes, the website needs improvement. If you have time to help, let us know

I’ll only be there until mid-afternoon Wednesday, so get in touch early if you want to meet up, and I’ll miss the remarkable ClubZone evening when the conference overflows into downtown Oslo.

Chris Ambler, European QA Director for games company Electronic Arts, tests some of the most complex software in the world

Daniel Jones and Marc Baker, Lean Enterprise Academy, are two of the most established Lean consultants in the world. Jones wrote, with James Womack, wrote “The Machine That Changed the World”, the standard book on the Toyota Production System.

There’s still time to propose your session.

Keith Braithwaite and I have been “producing” a track called Committing to Quality which we’re very pleased with. And I have a couple of sessions of my own…

On Thursday 13th March, I’m chairing a track at QCon London called XpDay Sampler. The idea is to build on the long-running success of the XpDay and run some of our sessions for, we hope, a new audience. We think we have a pretty strong track, finishing with a panel session including Kent Beck—who’s never actually spoken at XpDay but he did turn up unannounced at the first one bringing Swiss chocolate.

On Tuesday 11th, Romilly Cocking and I will be running a new tutorial we’re developing with Nat Pryce on Test-Driven Development with Mock Objects, following on from a successful first run at the last XpDay.

Finally, from the 16th I’ll be at SPA presenting with Mike Hill a taster of our new Examples course, and with Michael Feathers and Meirion Morgan (a quant friend of mine) a very introductory workshop on using a functional language (OCaml) using financial derivatives for our examples.

It’s about using examples to communicate, to tease out what really needs to be built in a format that everyone can understand, using FIT tables to help the team structure their ideas. We’ve run the core exercise of the course many times now (once with 60 people) and it really helps to test people’s assumptions—and it’s a great ice-breaker.

The course is not about implementation, we don’t crack open any code editors during the day.

We’re running the course in collaboration with SkillsMatter

Now the dust has settled, I can reflect a little on the recent XpDay Manattan. I was impressed by the quality of the people there, and how everyone pitched in to the OpenSpace sessions, I have vague memories of people trying to sort out J.B.’s life whilst my jet-lag kicked in. Some people came quite a distance to get there, so Joe’s providing a useful service. Unfortunately, Naresh Jain, who was also talking, got stuck on the way home

For my talk, I chose the concept of Sustainability, in its widest sense, partly because I’ve done a couple of project where I end up looking like the picture above. I used a definition from the UN’s Bruntland Commission

[meeting] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

There were so many things I wanted to cover that I ended up doing an Alphabet Talk. That way, if the audience didn’t like a topic there’d be another one along in a couple of minutes. The list is below. Most of the topics should be obvious to a sophisticated Agile expert (like you, dear reader), but there were a couple of points I noticed along the way. First, most of the points are about people, but you still have to have the technical skills to deliver. The other thing I realised (finally) about putting all the data up on the walls is that it’s an invitation to stakeholders to join the team.

¹Picture from http://www.hi.is/~oi/siberia_photos.htm