If you’re in the Leeds area next Wednesday, why not come along to this Agile Yorkshire session?
10th June - Gojko Adzic: Slim, The Future Of FitNesse
Details
This talk will introduce Slim, the most important upgrade to FitNesse in years. Slim is the new test runner which promises to bring platform interoperability, easier integration, a much simpler programming model and lots of small helpers that will allow us to write and maintain executable specifications and acceptance tests easier. This is a session for .NET and Java developers. Some prior exposure to FitNesse and FIT would be beneficial, but not required.
Speaker
Gojko Adzic is a software craftsman with a passion for new technologies, programming and writing. He runs Neuri Ltd, a UK-based consultancy that helps companies build better software by introducing agile practices and tools and improving communication between software teams, stakeholders and clients. See http://gojko.net/about/ for more details.
Venue: Victoria Hotel, Central Leeds
Date/Time: Wednesday, 10th June, 6:30pm sharp.
More details: http://www.agileyorkshire.org/
Tuesday of this week was a good day for conference announcements.
First, Ben Hall announced the next Alt.Net.UK conference, to be held in London over the course of a full summer weekend. This includes an Alt.Net beers session on the Friday night, one of Alan Dean’s much talked-about Open Space Coding days on the Saturday, and finally an AltNetConf Open Space discussion on the Sunday. The value to any prospective attendee would appear to be sizable, yet the cost? As with all Alt.Net.UK events, it’s free.
Later that day, when our American cousins awoke, Jeff and Joel announced a series of five Stack Overflow DevDays, to be held in four US cities and London, UK. Deliberately priced reasonably at just $99/£85, the places have filled up fast – the cost seems to be low enough to pose no barrier for most of those interested in attending, even in these harsh economic times.
This caused one of the Alt.NET UK organisers, Alan Dean, to tweet the following hypothetical question:
“We intend to keep http://www.altnetuk.com / free (we like it that way) but I’m curious: if it were a paid event, how much do people think that tickets would cost?
It’s a tricky question, especially in the current economic climate, and there’s definitely a difference between “tickets would cost” and “people would be willing to pay”. But having given it some thought, I tweeted this reply:
@adean alt.net pricing – for the recent In The North event, perhaps £195? For full weekend, incl. codeday, more like £495. But free is good!
And here’s my thinking: looking at pricing for the big name conferences such as Tech-Ed, DevWeek, DevTeach, Mix, or Software Architect, you can expect to pay thousands of euros, dollars or pounds. Plus, they’re always held on weekdays, which further increases the effective cost for freelancers such as myself.
From a technical learning perspective, one of the most useful paid conferences I ever attended was Software Architect 2007 (see this blog post). The speakers were generally excellent, and really helped me get to grips with concepts including Contract First Development, Loose Coupling and Inversion of Control, which have all since been staples of the solutions I’ve developed. But as I mentioned at the time, the attitudes of some of the other attendees surprised me:
“It amazed me that a number of my fellow delegates kept raising their hands and asking questions which invariably began "Yeah, but why can't I just...", followed by suggestions which effectively seemed to boil down to creating hardcoded, inflexible solutions! To say that this was supposedly a conference of architects, even relatively simple concepts such as Reflection, Polymorphism and Generics seemed to be lost on some people, who apparently would be more comfortable maintaining massive switch statements for the rest of eternity!”
Although there is some overlap in delegates, there’s a notable difference in the attendee demographic between the big paid conferences and the shoestring community affairs. Generally speaking, many of the attendees at the former tend to have their costs covered by their employers, and perhaps see such events as being a cunning way to get an easy day out of the office. By contrast, those people who give up their weekends and pay their own way to participate in community events are invariably passionate about technology and best practices. As a result, these tend to be the better way to network, socialise, learn, share experiences, and generally meet like-minded individuals (as opposed to suffering death by PowerPoint), and how do you put a price on that?
I consider that, for the right attendees, the OpenConf Alt.NET events offer the same value as these big-budget conferences, but without the associated glamour, high-profile speakers, swag, and other overheads.
So, with a finger waving wildly in the air, I thought that a figure of £495, being approximately half the cost of a typical three-day conference, sounded reasonable. But then an afterthought struck me, and I followed up on my original tweet with:
@adean ...although having said that, any charge would change the attending demographic, probably negatively so, and hence reduce the value!
Gah, it’s a paradox! The intrinsic value of the OpenConf format is that it attracts the passionate folk who turn up, unfunded by their employers, out of their love for tech. Start charging an appropriate sum, and the demographic will change, reducing the value of the conference accordingly.
Fortunately, the Alt.Net.UK organisers have no plans to start charging, so this can remain merely a curious hypothetical discussion!
What do you think? Which events, paid or community-driven, do you consider to be most useful to your career and personal development?
If I can get a pass out from helping to look after the burgeoning Nelson family for an evening, I’ll be going along to this Agile Yorkshire session next Wednesday.
May 13th - Ralph Williams: Exploratory Testing
Details
In this session, Ralph will provide an overview of some techniques that bring Agility into the world of testing. (The world of testing is a strange place: regarded by most people as a nice place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there, it is an unmapped wilderness where the waterfall methodology still roams unfettered.)
The main focus will be on one such technique, Exploratory Testing. It is defined by many as "simultaneous learning, test design and test execution", but Ralph will attempt to be more helpful. After the presentation many of you will claim this is what you have been doing all along, but now it has a fancy name you can use it without shame and companies can sell you high-priced consultancy in it.
Speaker
Ralph Williams is a Test Consultant at the Yorkshire Building Society, based in Bradford. The Society develops much of the application software used throughout its 140 branches and offices, and Ralph is responsible for managing the testing for some of these systems. He has previously worked in various management, testing and development roles at Erudine, Wanadoo and British Telecom, and specialises in Agile Testing and chocolate.
Venue: Victoria Hotel, Central Leeds
Date/Time: Wednesday, 13th May, 6.30pm for a 7.00pm start.
More details: http://www.agileyorkshire.org/
I spent much of this weekend over in Bradford, talking shop with the good folks at the Alt.Net UK ‘in the North’ conference. I had a great time, learned much, and am grateful to Richard Fennell of Black Marble and the other organisers and sponsors for making the event possible.
This was the first Open Spaces event I’ve attended, and I was pleasantly surprised at how orderly and productive the sessions turned out to be. Unlike conventional sales-pitch conferences of the MSDN roadshow variety, this was more of an open forum, with an expectation that all of the relatively small number (25ish?) of participants would, well, participate!
I was also surprised to find that there were more pragmatists in attendance than architecture astronauts. Maybe it’s a reflection of the current economic climate, but a common theme was on finding toolings that were good enough with which to deliver suitable solutions quickly and effectively, rather than striving for architectural purity and perfection.
It was great to hear some war stories, and learn about technologies, tools, methodologies and ideas that are currently exciting other people. It would be difficult to come away from a weekend like this one without some inspiration and a big list of several things to follow up on. Here’s mine:
- MVC Framework – like myself, a lot of the attendees have had enough of the WebForms model, and are excited about the potential of ASP.NET MVC.
- Fluent NHibernate – it sounds like the project being feverishly worked on by James Gregory et al is ready for prime time. People spoke very positively of the ability to ditch XML HBM files in favour of this strongly-typed configuration.
- Balsamiq Mockups – loved by everyone, even despite (or should that be because of?) its use of Comic Sans MS!
- Inversion of Control – there was a wide mix of IoC containers being used. I’ve tried Castle Windsor, other people made positive murmurings about Unity and StructureMap.
- TypeMock Isolator – apparently capable of mocking the unmockable.
- Sketching User Experiences – everyone who’d heard of him spoke highly of Bill Buxton’s work.
- Open Quarters CMS – a great demonstration of a CMS built on ASP.NET MVC by Anthony Main and Andrew Magee. I look forward to taking a squizz at the source, I’m sure it will be an excellent learning aid.
- SWAT – a web testing tool developed by some folks at Ultimate Software and released on Sourceforge as an open source project (thanks to Nick for the link).
- Wild Blue Yonder – a delicious amber ale from Oregon which was on tap at the Sir Titus Salt pub, to where we decamped after the planning session on Friday night. Yum!
I’m probably forgetting some things, there was a lot to take in, and I regret not having a pad of paper on hand. Hopefully my memory will be jogged by the blog postings of the other attendees.
Thanks again to all who made it possible, and all the attendees for quality the chat and inspiration.
I’m coming round to the realization that my hugely enjoyable first contract at Ventura last summer might have been something of an anomaly. That project was decidedly agile, test-driven, and used a bunch of modern technologies including Monorail, ExtJS, Subversion, NUnit and NHibernate. The requirements were well-defined, and the team was highly effective, with a pragmatic project management team who kept the development team free from bureaucratic processes, leaving us able to get on with delivering some cracking software in double-quick time.
So, it has been something of a surprise to move onto pastures new and discover that there are still organisations out there who follow the Waterfall model and highly prescriptive change control processes. It also seems that no amount of evangelism or proselytism from freelancers such as myself is likely to change the situation any time soon – it’s just the organisational culture. To be realistic, there comes a point in time at which I have to accept that fact, shut up, and knuckle down to achieving the project deliverables in the manner requested by the client. The customer is always right, as they say.
As I bide my time looking for some new clients who share my development methodology ideologies, I’ve been trying to retain some semblance of sanity by keeping on top of agile techniques and technologies, and by seeking kindred spirits with whom to discuss the same. I was pleasantly surprised to discover the existence of the Agile Yorkshire Club, who meet monthly in the back room of a pub in Leeds. So I pitched up last Wednesday, enjoyed the free beer, met some friendly and seemingly like-minded people, and listened to an interesting session by Richard Fennell of Black Marble as he talked about Alistair Cockburn’s Crystal Clear methodology, which seemed to me to be essentially “Pragmatic SCRUM”.
I’ve often heard people say that it’s a good idea to get involved with a local user group, or attend community events, and now I’m starting to appreciate why. In addition to the mind-broadening opportunities, the networking potential for freelancers is also an obvious benefit. If, like me, you’ve never before tried to get “out there” and meet other IT professionals, why not give it a shot? If a shy and reserved geek like me can do it, anyone can.
And if you organise or know of other, similar groups local to Leeds, I’d be interested in hearing about them.
