An fun privilege for me as a Softhouse employee was the opportunity to make a short interview with Andy Hunt, of Pragmatic Programmer fame, about his latest book Pragmatic Thinking & Learning and the Øresund Agile workshop with the same title.
Øresund Agile 2009 web site is now open!
I’m not sure if I can make it to Øresund Agile 2009 on May 12-14, but I sure would like to participate in Pragmatic Programmer Andy Hunt’s workshop on Pragmatic Thinking and Learning! I’m close to the end of my first reading of the book with the same title.
Nordic Agile in Stockholm on December 1-4
Øresund Agile goes Nordic Agile!
Scrum for team members is a workshop directed to the developers and testers in an agile team,, an obviously very important component in an agile project but maybe not so much the primary target for conferences and the like.
I liked Jim Coplien’s Agile Architecture session on Øresund Agile 2008 very much so I’m pretty sure I can recommend his workshops at Nordic Agile. (Btw, I saw him rushing by at Kastrup Airport the other week!)
The agile team that I’m part of will most likely be delivering version 1.0 of our current project around those dates, so I won’t be going but I hope you will. Read more on the Nordic Agile web page!
I almost forgot, Clarion Hotel is really nice too! 🙂
On a related note: I like the word the Norweigans use for agile: smidig.
Øresund Agile 2008 Conference Day
(Continued from Accelerated Agile on Øresund Agile 2008.)
After two days of workshops, Wednesday was the conference day. Two sessions specifically addressed distributed Scrum: having teams, or part of teams, in different geographic locations. The presentation by Scrum co-creator Jeff Sutherland was great but also a bit utopian while the other, by Arto Vihavainen and Muqeet Kahn from Qvantel, was not only interesting but also very down to earth. Tobias Fors from Citerus had a very the best presentation slides and Henrik Kniberg told a great tale of Scrum and XP adoption.
Next year’s conference, obviously Øresund Agile 2009, will be in Copenhagen on May 12-14. Add it to your calendar right now!
Accelerated Agile on Øresund Agile 2008
Yesterday I participated in the Accelerated Agile workshop at Øresund Agile 2008. It was attended by both developers and non-developers. Some parts of the workshop were common for the two groups and others were separate. Me and another developer actually did both TDD and pair programming! BestBrains, the company that organized the workshop, had prepared an Eclipse project in a Subversion repository, using Maven to build and with CruiseControl for automated build on commit. We pair programmed on an MS Windows machine but I tried on my Ubuntu Linux machine to and it worked fine.
Agile Architecture on Øresund Agile 2008
Today, on the first day of Øresund Agile 2008, I attended the Agile Architecture workshop held by Jim Coplien. He is a really great speaker! Some things that stuck in my head:
- Don’t use TDD, it destroys architecture because it makes the programmer focus on individual methods, losing the bigger picture on the way
- Don’t bother with unit tests, they make a bigger code base (equal amounts of application and unit test code is not unlikely), meaning more defects! The system tests should be enough
- A subset of system tests that run in less than ten minutes should be used as a smoke test.
- For interactive systems he was able to unify Agile software development, Model-View-Controller(-User) and Object Orientation.
- MVC inventor Trygve Reenskaug was referred to a few times, and Jim told us that Trygve’s Data-Collaboration-Algorithm (DCA) was going to be the next big thing in software development! (This will be the seventh hit or so on a Google search for "Data-Collaboration-Algorithm". Maybe I should make a dedicated blog post about it.)
- Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are bad because they add new languages to learn when new people should work on a system, and it takes years to create a good language.
- UML could be used to visualize a system, but should be generated from source code. Quote: "No hand should ever touch a UML diagram."
Food for thought, isn’t it?
The list above is unfortunately a little short on things that Jim advocates but I need some good sleep before the Accelerated Agile workshop tomorrow and my writing would not be half as good as hearing him saying it.