Extreme Enthusiasm

TL;DR: The conference was pleasant, energetic and informative. The organizers did an excellent job of coordinating a very large program. The city, of course, is awesome. I met old and new friends, and I learned a lot.

I had the chance to present my two sessions to some great people. Just 5-7 people partecipating in each session, but they were the right people.

I attended an introduction to Continuous Deployment by Luca Minudel. Luca presented in a very clear and concise way what CD is and what are its main components. From this session, and another one by Seb Rose, I see that the idea of “CD pipelines” has now become common.

I attended the keynote by Pekka Abrahamsson. Pekka jokes that while working in his academic ivory tower, his group managed to create innovative products with undergraduate students. I was impressed by an experimental system for getting rid of a dangerous parasyte in beehives.

I attended the keynote by Robert Martin. I actually had a chance to shake hands with the man. Martin’s thesis is that we need to do something to improve the standards of quality in our profession, before some ugly software-related incident forces the regulators to do that to us. For Martin, the best chance for us to do that is to apply the practices of Extreme Programming. XP was invented by Kent Beck “to heal the divide between business people and programmers.” In recent times, Martin sees that the Agile Movement is increasingly concerned with project management, and less and less interested in the programming practices. This drove away many programmers from Agile, who then formed the Software Craftsmanship movement. And this is a massive #fail: the divide is back. XP still has the potential to heal this divide. By focusing on the practices, not just the principles or the values, XP helps programmers achieve better results more cheaply. But you must stress the practices. As Uncle Bob puts it, “do we do the practices? Or do we ‘let the team decide’”? The team, says Martin, has an agenda. If the team refuses to do a practice, he says, it’s because the team has something to hide.

I attended the keynote by Joshua Kerievsky. Joshua presented his view of “safety at work”, which is both metaphoric (as in “I caused a small injury to my customer by exposing him or her to a bug”) and literal. I can see how seeing things from the point of view of “safety” leads, in part, to the same kind of process improvements that you would do with the goal of improving quality: find the root cause of defects and remove them, and so on. But safety is more general; it’s not just protecting money. As you can see on Industrial Logic’s website, it’s a more general thing. I think I like Joshua’s idea. It resonates with the teachings of Tom Gilb, who is always stressing good engineering. Excellent engineering is always keen on safety at work. Joshua quoted the engineer who built the Golden Gate Bridge, with far less fatalities than were expected by the statistics of the time. I add that the same is true of Filippo Brunelleschi, the engineer who built the dome of the Florence Cathedral.

On a side note, I was finally convinced to try Industrial Logic’s elearning resources. I can’t wait to have time to get into it.

Another note: someone asked Joshua what he made of the current debate on “TDD is Dead”. Joshua joked that his company celebrated the funeral of TDD by issuing a 50% discount on their TDD elearning modules. It was so successful that some of his customers asked if BDD was also going to die soon :-) He said that by and large DHH is grossly misinformed on TDD, even though he has a few good points.

I attended a session by Steve Holyer and Nancy Van Schooenderwoert, on how a coach can maximize his or her chances of success before accepting a coaching engagement. The main thing I got from the session is a better understanding of Jerry Weinberg’s principle of Organizational Addiction. I had read Quality Software Management Vol. 3, but I never got round to think how to use the addiction model as a tool for making sense of what happens at work, and what to do about it.

I attended a session by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock on how to deal with complex requirements. This session was going a bit too fast for me :) I can’t say I was able to follow the exercise, but it gave something to chew on later.

I attended an interesting prentation by Seb Rose on a tool for assessing the quality of a suite of tests by introducing bugs and seeing if the tests detect them.

I partecipated in a very interesting game by Michele Finelli on Alerting, Logging and Monitoring. I was later given a private lesson by Michele on this very subject. I think Michele should write something on the subject; most developers, including me before Michele’s lesson, have very foggy notions on this subject.

I noticed that some people were wearing tee shirts advertising XP2015 in Finland! And at dinner on Tuesday I learned that they had already decided the location for XP2016! Me and my friends organizers for the Italian Agile Day should learn something from this :)