Bas Vodde’s talk on Tuesday “The Trouble With Component Teams And An Alternative“. The title is somewhat obtuse, but the talk was great. Essentially he was talking about the problems with scaling very large projects when the teams are focused around the components of the system rather than the features. He had a really good model as to what happens in the two approaches and how component alignment creates problems.
My talk on the patterns & practices Service Factory:ME team’s experiences with Continuous Integration (CI) and our data analysis of the CI and Team Foundation Server logs is this morning at Agile 2008. You can find the presentation for this talk here:
One Hundred Days of Continuous Integration - slide deck
One Hundred Days of Continuous Integration - paper
Here’s the abstract from the conference paper.
Many agile teams use Continuous Integration (CI). It is one of the Extreme Programming practices and has been broadly adopted by the community [1]. Just how effective is it? Does the effort of maintaining the CI server and fixing build breaks save time compared to a lengthier check-in process that attempts to never break the build? While much anecdotal evidence exists as to the benefits of CI there is very little in the way of data to support this. How do you convince teams and management that it’s worth adopting and how best to do it? This report outlines our experience with CI in a distributed team environment and attempts to answer these questions.
The deck actually includes some speaker notes so it’s not complete unintelligible even if you didn’t attend the talk. I’ve also attached both the deck and the paper (PDF) to the original session slot on the Agile 2008 site (login required to see attachments here).
I post frequently on Continuous Integration and agile development as well as a host of related topics.
Tuesday I attended a workshop on behavior driven development (BDD) And Ruby by Gregg Pollack. I learnt a bit more about Ruby and finally get the BDD thing. The p&p developers have been playing around with dynamic languages in their spare time and having quite
The slides and sample code are available on railsenvy.com as are some very funny videos in the same vein as I’m a Mac and I’m a PC.
I’ve been writing a bit of Ruby but suspect I’m actually writing C# in Ruby. Brian Button pointed me at some videos on Ruby and metaprogramming on the Pragmatic Programmer site which might help me overcome that.
This is a dump of all the suggestions that came up during the “What Makes Distributed Agile Projects Succeed (or Fail)?” workshop by Chris Sims on Tuesday afternoon. I’ve highlighted the ones what the group agreed were the top three.
The opening keynote speaker is James Surowiecki. It’s a great talk! I’m tempted to buy his book. He had some great pointers into how to use the decision making process of crowds and best practices on how not to skew the crowds results. Some of this plays right back into agile estimation and retrospectives.
Weirdly enough I set his wisdom of the crowds test question for the talk “How many lines of code are there in Visual Studio 2005?”.
Looking forward to finally getting into BDD and Ruby on Rails later this morning.
This year’s agile conference is bigger, and better than before. This leads to the problem of what the hell to go and listen to. Here’s my strategy for the week…
The testing guidance team have just shipped a new CTP in time for Agile 2008. You can grab the PDF from their CodePlex site:
http://www.codeplex.com/TestingGuidance
We’re looking for feedback (as always) so don’t be shy!
Bumping into lots of people I haven’t seen much throughout the year, including Mitch Lacey, David Anderson (of Modus Cooperandi) and Chris Sterling, it’s only Monday morning!
There’s a lot of people from Microsoft here, including several speakers. This is nice to see, as it’s a reflection of the increased importance of agile within Microsoft and it’s engagement with the rest of the community. Two years ago I think there might have been half the number of attendees and very few speakers from Redmond.
Looking for some research papers to dig into further during today’s research in progress tracks. I’ll post more if anything grabs my attention.
The Agile Beer nights are back. Check out http://agilebug.com/ for more details:
We the practitioners of Agile and users of Beer, hereby proclaim Agile Beer Night.
The Agile Beer Users Group (Seattle Chapter) will be meeting on Thursday Aug 21, for information sharing, networking, agile discussions, a brief topic presentation on Automated Acceptance Testing, oh - and BEER. Come meet us for a discussion and brief presentation on Agile practices each month.
There is good food, good beer, and a good chance to meet some of the folks who do agile development in the Pacific Northwest, get to know their tricks, and share in their success. The Owl has a fine selection of food, drinks, and spirits for those who choose them.
ABN next meeting will be held in Seattle at the Owl and Thistle Irish Pub and Restaurant at 808 Post Avenue in downtown Seattle from 5PM to 8PM on Thursday August 21 2008.
The September ABN meeting will be on the East side in Redmond or Bellevue, but plans are not firm yet - stay tuned…
Not sure if I can make this yet but nice to see someone taking on the organization.
My pictures from the Bugaboos are now online in my climbing web site’s picture gallery. There’s also a short write-up of the trip.
We got quite a lot done and I’m back just in time to go to Toronto next week for Agile 2008, which promises to be a blast. I’m looking forward to a lot of good talks on distributed development and speaking about my experiences on a p&p team using continuous integration. Hopefully I’ll see some of you at the conference. Visual Studio has a stand at the conference too and various other people from Redmond will be speaking.
Of course this also means I didn’t end up having a accident with a moose.
Welcome to my blog on software development and probably a whole lot more. If you're looking for alpine climbing you'll find it on my climbing web site and blog.
The Wisdom of Crowds: James Surowiecki: Books
