XP 2012

Here are some random notes taken during the 13th International Conference on Agile Software Development in Malmö, Sweden.

This conference has a heavier presence of professionals compared to many academic conferences. To simplify I would say that presentations in academic conferences are heavy with content, but on irrelevant topics, while presentations form professional are on relevant topics but are lacking in substance.

Best quote today, from Jutta Eckstein: “A sign of lack of trust is formalism”. In organisations where trust is completely pervasive they tend to rely on formalism, i.e. meeting protocols, process documentation, etc.

Clarke Ching's TDD Test Drive

Tankesaft, a blog about innovation, inspiration and development by Karl-Magnus Möller – only in Swedish.

So far there have been some highlights: Jan Boris-Möller talked about making food from an engineering perspective. He specialises in catering for events, which is quite different form working at a restaurant. It isn’t very agile in the sense that the prerequisites change once the event takes place, but is is very agile since he does not want to keep notes/plans/… from one event to the next avoiding pushing any preconceived solutions to the client. He talked about the order to implement things as a professional chef (colour->…->amount->texture->taste, and not taste first which is the amateur's starting point). He also talked about balancing quality attributes; the client can only have two of fast, cheap and good, but never all three (if you you want it fast and cheap it can never taste good).
Later in the evening he mingled and talked about the necessity of having both experience and knowledge (and they not being the same), and the necessity to educate the client/customer about the consequences of what they order in order to meet their expectations.  Her also wants to inform the guests before eating of the thinking about designing the dishes which he thought enhanced the experience. a lot of developers could learn from this. And yeah, the food was excellent, traditional Swedish resources and flavours in new ways. Definitely the best conference dinner I have had.

One of the most interesting presentations was from Lars Arrhed, a lawyer, talking about contracts regulating agile development. It contained too much information to convey but some a points was: Suppliers (developers) and clients talk different languages. Clients often have a vision of what the resulting product/system should be, which may be very vaguely described in the contract (“Fully integrated system” and “functional administrative system” were two examples from real contracts in court cases). Therefore a supplier should show progress instead of telling about techniques and methods.

I attended some workshops and tutorials on testing and test-driven design. It felt good I could reason about how to refactor a program in a programming language I don't know (Python). On the other hand I was completely stumped when trying to do "wolf-pack programming" in Smalltalk. I could reason about the program in general terms, but it was very hard to write working lines of code.

In test-driven-design I understand the value of producing high-quality code, but the very small loop increments seem almost to hinder elegant designs that are easy to understand.