Sandro Mancuso Codurance
Jason Gorman Codemanship
Stuart Arthur Intellectual Property Office (IPO)
Marcello Duarte Inviqa Ltd (UK)
Trisha Gee Jetbrains
Konstantin Kudryashov Inviqa Ltd (UK)
Steve Tooke Independent Consultant
Samir Talwar Codurance
Chris Cundill Kainos
Felienne Hermans Infotron
Jiri Knesl SprintMasters
Simon Brown Independent Consultant
Thomas Sundberg Independent Consultant
Christopher Batey DataStax
Janos Feher Intern Avenue
Alexandru Bolboaca Mozaic Works
Clifton Green Valtech
Kevin Murray Valtech
Patroklos Papapetrou
Adam Tornhill Consultant
Erik Talboom Co-Learning
Franzi Sauerwein Codurance
Christos Matskas Software Lounge
Peter Souter Puppetlabs
Adrian Bolboaca Mozaic Works
Pete Smith Equal Experts
Sander Hoogendoorn Independent Consultant
Rachel Davies Unruly
Information to follow
Sandro Mancuso Software Craftsman, Codurance
Software craftsman, author, and founder of the London Software Craftsmanship Community (LSCC). Sandro has been coding since a very young age but only started his professional career in 1996. He has worked for startups, software houses, product companies, international consultancy companies, and investment banks.
During his career Sandro had the opportunity to work in a good variety of projects, with different languages, technologies, and across many different industries. Sandro has a lot of experience in bringing the Software Craftsmanship ideology and Extreme Programming practices to organisations of all sizes. Sandro is internationally renowned by his work on evolving and spreading Software Craftsmanship and is frequently invited to speak in many conferences around the world. His professional aspiration is to raise the bar of the software industry by helping developers become better at and care more about their craft.
A critically overlooked aspect of Continuous Delivery is the need to maintain the internal quality of our software to enable us to sustain the pace of innovation. Experience teaches us that Continuous Delivery is not sustainable without Clean Code.
Just as with functional bugs, code quality 'bugs' are best caught early, and for this we find we need some kind of Continuous Testing approach to raise the alarm as soon after code smells are introduced as possible.
Continuous Inspection is the missing discipline in Continuous Delivery. It is essentially continuous non-functional testing of our code to ensure that we will be able to change it later.
In this tutorial, participants will learn how to implement Continuous Inspection using readily available off-the-shelf tools like Checkstyle, Simian, Emma, Java/NDepend and Sonar, as well as rigging up our own bespoke code quality tests using more advanced techniques with reflection and parser generators like ANTLR.
They will also learn about key Continuous Inspection practices that can be used to more effectively manage the process and deliver more valuable results, like Non-functional Stories, Clean Code Check-ins, Build Inspections and Rising Tides (a practice that can be applied to incrementally improving the maintainability of legacy code).
Jason Gorman Programmer & Trainer, Codemanship
Jason Gorman, a software development practitioner, trainer, coach and author based in London with two decades’ experience working with teams in a wide range of industries. Jason has worked with teams at the BBC, City Index, Electronic Arts, Higher Education Statistics Agency, BUPA, British Standards Institute, The Post Office, Merrill Lynch HSBC, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Orange, Lloyds TSB, AOL, Reed Business Information and Symbian, and many more.
Jason chairs the Software Craftsmanship conference in the UK, and is a contributor to other conferences including QCon, Software Practice Advancement, XPDay, Agile Finland, JAX London and CITCON Europe.
His web site, parlezuml.com, has been visited by more than a million software professionals since 2003, and his free tutorials on use cases, UML, OO design and Test-driven Development have had more than 500,000 downloads.
Jason is a patron of the Bletchley Park Trust, and a fundraiser for programming clubs and the STAK St Austell Community Kitchen
Remote working is an increasing trend for several startups and 'traditional' companies. Hiring people globally decreases costs but it hides a lot of risks and difficulties, especially when it comes to manage remote workers. Different cultures, time-zones, not face-to-face interactions are some of the problems that a development manager or a technical leader will have to solve.
During the last months I had the chance to to manage lots of development teams all around the world. In this session I will share with you my experience and discuss some great ideas and practices I have learned and followed.
Presentation structure
Patroklos Papapetrou Software Architect,
Patroklos Papapetrou is a software architect, addicted to software quality and an agile team leader with more than 15 years of experience in software development. He believes and invests in people and team spirit seeking quality excellence. He’s one of the authors of SonarQube in action book and he’s currently writing 'The Art of Software Gardening'. He treats software systems as flowers that’s why he prefers calling himself a software gardener.
He's an occasional speaker giving talks about clean code, code quality and software gardening.
Marcello reflects over the craftsmanship manifesto and its elements to uncover some interesting insights regarding the application of the underlying principles in real life projects and in the context of organisations and communities struggling to live up to the expectations it creates.
Marcello Duarte Lead Developer, Inviqa Ltd (UK)
Marcello Duarte is a lead developer of PhpSpec and heads the Training at Inviqa, a leading PHP consultancy business in Europe. As an Agile coach, Marcello has coached many teams in many organisations into Agile processes and development practices like Scrum, TDD, Refactoring, Collaborative Product Ownership and Software Quality. He was officially recognised as the Best Agile Coach/Mentor (Technical) at the UK Agile Awards 2014.
Testing has been part of the software delivery lifecycle since… forever. Now, Agile methodologies make testing part of everyone’s responsibilities. But despite this, despite big steps forward with TDD, BDD, and other approaches which bring automated testing to the forefront of the development process, many developers still behave as if testing is a second class citizen.
What can you do to help developers a) write tests b) write meaningful tests and c) write readable tests?
Trisha will talk about her experiences of working in a team that wanted to build quality into their new software version without a painful overhead – without a QA / Testing team, without putting in place any formal processes, without slavishly improving the coverage percentage.
The team had been writing automated tests and running them in a continuous integration environment, but they were simply writing tests as another tick box to check, there to verify the developer had done what the developer had aimed to do. The team needed to move to a model where tests provided more than this. The tests needed to:Demonstrate that the library code was meeting the requirements document in a readable fashion what those requirements were, and what should happen under non-happy-path situations provide enough coverage so a developer could confidently refactor the code
This talk will cover how the team selected a new testing framework (Spock, a framework written in Groovy that can be used to test JVM code) to aid with this effort, and how they evaluated whether this tool would meet the team’s needs. And now, two years after starting to use Spock, Trisha can talk about how both the tool and the shift in the focus of the purpose of tests has affected the quality of the code. And, interestingly, the happiness of the developers.
Trisha Gee Coder, Blogger, Speaker, Jetbrains
Trisha has developed Java applications for a range of industries, including finance, manufacturing and non-profit, for companies of all sizes. She has expertise in Java high performance systems, is passionate about enabling developer productivity, and dabbles with Open Source development. Trisha blogs regularly on subjects that she thinks developers and other humans should care about, she’s a leader of the Sevilla Java User Group, a key member of the London Java Community and a Java Champion – she believes we shouldn't all have to make the same mistakes again and again.
Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) and Domain Driven Design (DDD) seen a great growth in adoption in recent years. We are all creating new practices and tools that try and bring these two very important modern methodologies together. What if we have it backwards and they were actually together all along? What if most of the misunderstandings and challenges we face in implementing BDD are spawned from the very simple mistake of us separating something that was created as a whole? In this talk we'll delve into BDD as it was meant to be done from the beginning and look at its very rooted connection with the software design.
Konstantin Kudryashov Developer, Inviqa Ltd (UK)
Konstantin is a PHP developer that through tools and methodologies got deep into the business analysis area. Currently he is a BDD practice manager at Inviqa Ltd (UK). His current job is a process of bringing agile projects to life through bridging communication gaps between business and delivery teams.
Developers love to get a program into their heads and hold it there. When we’re working on a problem alone this feels like the best way to work, it keeps the code and our ideas connected in a way that feels good and seems to amplify productivity.
This doesn’t scale.
What happens when you add more heads? What happens when the problem is so complex the solution is too big to fit in your head?
We’ll look at how we can give up the illusion of control but keep that connection between the code and the ideas – even when we are working with other people on complex problems.
Steve Tooke Programmer, Trainer, Coach, Independent Consultant
I’m Steve Tooke (@tooky on twitter). I’ve been part of the UK software craftsmanship community for a while now. I was the founder of the 1st UK SC group, the now defunct SCGUK (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/SCGUK). We ran a number of evening meetings, involving code katas and lightning talks.
I’ve run hands-on sessions at the LSCC and the run a session at the Bletchley Park Software Craftsmanship conference. I was also one of the co-authors of the Minisculus Challenge (http://minisculuschallenge.com/index.html) a fun coding challenge we developed for the SC2010 conference.
I am a programmer, consultant, trainer and coach — I focus on improving my craft and helping others improve theirs. I help teams continue to deliver valuable software by improving their team practices and communication, and keeping their code maintainable.
Building a large application often feels like an exercise in futility. No matter how we do it, even test-driving everything, there’s always one more bug. We make one thing more robust and another falls over. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And when that massive change request comes in, building a new feature while keeping the bugs out is even harder.
So what if things couldn’t go wrong?
I want to talk to you about types.
You’re probably familiar with classes and at least one variant of object-oriented programming. You know what types are and you use them all the time. So what are you missing?
First of all, I want to talk about readability. Often, we use classes for enhancing the behaviour of values. Let’s do the opposite: reduce the behaviour. It's the Unix philosophy. 'Do one thing, and do it well.'
Secondly, I’d like to look at flexibility, and how to write code that really is changeable without spending weeks and introducing regressions. We’ll look at polymorphism, composition, and a few refactoring techniques.
Thirdly, let’s wander into the scary-sounding halls of correctness. We’ll look at our type system not as an encapsulation mechanism but as a theorem prover, using it to iron out potential bugs before they can take root.
Finally, we’ll venture into the halls of optimisation, using our new types to improve performance without damaging the quality of our code. We’re going for maintainable code that’s fast too.
Programming languages have come along leaps and bounds in the last 20 years, but often we code as if we’re still writing in that original dream of Bjarne Stroustrup, 'C with Classes'. We can do so much better.
Learn how Scala and the wider Typesafe stack is used in GOV.UK Digital Services, and specifically within the DVLA. Scala has helped improve delivery time and performance of systems. See real-life examples including a Play app serving citizens and Akka for serving batch licence requests.
Chris Cundill Lead Developer, Kainos
Chris is an experienced software developer who has built enterprise systems supporting over 10,000 users and capable of processing over a 1,000 transactions per minute. Chris specialises in Scala and Java technologies. He has a keen awareness of software application security and his work has been verified using penetration testing, performed by the National Computing Centre, on a number of occasions. Chris is a CIW associate and holds a GIAC certificate in Web Application Security.
Chris also contributes to open source projects frequently. He also plays an active role in the community; attending and speaking at various tech meet-ups.
Spreadsheets are often dismissed by developers for not being 'proper programming' but that is not true. Since I have shown that spreadsheets are Turing complete (http://boingboing.net/2013/09/20/implementing-a-turing-machine.html) you have no excuse to diss them any longer. In this session, I will implement various algorithms in Excel to show you its power and elegance.
After all, spreadsheets are ‘live’ and functional, so they have everything going for them. Furthermore they are very fit for TDD and rapid prototyping.
Reasons for attending this talk: Just as learning a second natural language is healthy for your brain (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-roitman/your-mind-on-language-how_b_3902184.html) so is learning multiple programming languages. Thinking about familiar problems like sorting or shortest path in a strange environment like spreadsheet formulas is like a workout for your brain.
Next time you are in need of a quick calculation or prototype, you do not have to waste time configuring a server and deploying your code. Surely not for everything, but for some problems, spreadsheets are really suited and this talk will teach you about how to handle those. Being emerged in the world that many of your colleagues and clients live and breath will make it easier to understand them. Don’t fight spreadsheets any longer, but learn to love them.
Felienne Hermans Professor & Entrepreneur, Infotron
Felienne is a professor and an entrepreneur in the field of spreadsheets. Her PhD thesis which she defended in 2013, centers on transferring techniques from software engineering, like testing and refactoring, to the world of spreadsheets. She now heads the 'spreadsheet lab' at TU Delft.
In 2010 Felienne founded Infotron, a startup that helps large companies improve the quality of their spreadsheets. In her spare time, Felienne works at a community center teaching kids to program with Lego Mindstorms.
While implementing Scrum and shortening Time To Market in large financial institution we were slowed down because of obstacles in planning and analysis. I came with the idea to use Theory of Constraints which helped us to calculate real TTM and gave us hints how to release faster and cheaper. Now they're ready to change direction anytime and do releases more often.
Presentation is suitable for people in organizations trying to lower workload of releases.
Jiri Knesl Developer, SprintMasters
Jiri developed software for 24 years. When not developing Information Systems or Web Applications he helps companies to adopt clean code, TDD and more lean and agile approach. Between his clients belong companies like AVG, Avast, ESET, Toyota Peugeot Citroen Automobile, Skoda Automobile, Honeywell and many others from startups to international enterprises. He often speaks at conferences in Czech Republic and Spain.
Software architecture and coding are often seen as mutually exclusive disciplines, despite us referring to higher level abstractions when we talk about our software. You've probably heard others on your team talking about components, services and layers rather than objects when they're having discussions. Take a look at the codebase though. Can you clearly see these abstractions or does the code reflect some other structure? If so, why is there no clear mapping between the architecture and the code? Why do those architecture diagrams that you have on the wall say one thing whereas your code says another? In fact, why is it so hard to automatically generate a decent architecture diagram from an existing codebase? Join us to explore this topic further.
Simon Brown Software Architect, Independent Consultant
Simon lives in Jersey (the largest of the Channel Islands) and works as an independent consultant, helping teams to build better software. His client list spans over 20 countries and includes organisations ranging from small technology startups through to global household names. Simon is an award-winning speaker and the author of Software Architecture for Developers - a developer-friendly guide to software architecture, technical leadership and the balance with agility. He still codes too.
Test driven development follows this pattern
Asking the system under test for its new state has traditionally been done to check the new state.
This can create problems with the Law of Demeter. The system under test knows unnecessary much about the objects it is collaborating with. This may not seem like a big deal, but when you try to break things apart and replace an object you may end up with refactoring a lot more than you actually wanted. It is like pulling up a tree with the roots. You will damage the ground a lot and have tons of soil among the roots afterwards.
Another approach would be to tell the system under test what to do and verify that it has been told properly. This will reduce coupling between objects, not break encapsulation, allocate functionality in the proper place, name functionality better according to the problem domain and prevent classes from being feature envy.
I will show some examples where I ask for the state and then compare them when I apply Tell – don't ask and discuss the differences.
Thomas Sundberg Consultant, Software developer, Speaker, Writer, Independent Consultant
Thomas Sundberg is an independent consultant based in Stockholm, Sweden. He has a Masters degree in Computer Science from the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, in Stockholm. Thomas has been working as a developer for more than 20 years. He has taught programming at The Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, one the leading technical universities in Sweden. Thomas has developed an obsession for technical excellence. This translates to Software Craftsmanship, Clean Code and Test Automation.
Thomas is a frequent speaker at different conferences and developer venues.
Thomas runs a blog where he writes about programming, Software craftsmanship and whatever problem he wants to share a solution about.
One man's story about the trials and tribulations of being an 'enterprise' developer. If you think you've experienced corporate dogma and constraint - the extent of it in this tale will put everything in perspective! I'll also give you proof that despite what anyone says, things can get better.
We've all heard it... or something similar. There's probably one senior guy at work who tells you this at least once a month. You've got an idea for an amazing new feature or practice that's going to save your company both time and money, but it's too 'cutting edge'; your management fears the unfamiliar and you are cruelly stifled.
'It doesn't work like that in Enterprise' is a passionate and motivational story about my journey as a developer in the face of one of the worst fallacies in our industry. The extremes of my experience will make you laugh & cry in equal measure, and maybe help put your own frustrations into perspective. Just remember, it does get better... and you probably got off very f***g lightly!
Pete Smith Software Consultant, Equal Experts
Pete is a software consultant based in London with almost 10 years of experience making web applications with Asp.Net, specialising in API design and Javascript browser-based applications. He is the author of Superscribe - a graph based routing framework, and the OData library Linq to Querystring.
There are tons of books, movies, videos online about growth-oriented companies. Even if we peel the startup romance off the stories, many of the advices and practicies that work in the US (more precisely in California) just doesn't work anywhere else.
It is sad to see first-time entrepreneurs and investors still try to adapt the same business models that worked for a company ten years back on the other side of the planet, and wonder why they are running toward failure full flank ahead.
Of course, unmaintained appearance may not be the synonym of coolness in your city, but we will discuss deeper problems, such as:
Janos Feher Lead Developer, Intern Avenue
Since 1998, I've designed and implemented hundreds of high-traffic websites and webapps in several 'industry', such as automitive, government, local government, NGO, real estate, energy, sectors, aviation, armed forces. From 2004, I've specialized to Drupal Content Management System based solutions, on the 'backend' side.
As I've run an own company since 2002, I'm familiar with basic accounting, company laws and regulations of Hungary, controlling and motivating a small team.
Whenever we talk about design in other domains than software, we discuss it from a user-centric point of view. Apple’s products are renowned because they focus on the experience of a user with their device: how it feels, how it looks, how fast it responds, the sounds it makes etc.
Software design is the only type of design that seems to be userless. After all, the end-user has no idea how the software works and doesn’t care. All they do care about is to work fine.
It turns out that software design is not userless. The user is the developer that will have to change the code after you do. So how about user-centric software design?
In this session I will show how to apply techniques from UX to software design in order to achieve: faster implementation of typical tasks and easier inclusion of new developers in the team.
Alexandru Bolboaca Programmer, Trainer, Coach, Mozaic Works
I am a polyglot programmer, trainer and coach at Mozaic Works. I've worked for almost 15 years in software development, for various industries and in various european countries and UK.
I co-facilitated the first code retreat outside US in Bucharest in 2009. Since then, I've facilitated tens of events such as coding dojos, architectural katas, code retreats and others in many countries from Europe.
I am also a contributor to publications and blogs such as: Today Software Magazine, Agile Record Magazine, mozaicworks.com/blog and my own blog, alexbolboaca.ro.
As companies and organisations of all shapes and sizes come to grips with the fact that UX is critical to project and product success, a common question resurfaces time and again: How do we add Lean UX practices to our current Agile process?
Bringing the practice of Lean UX in to an organisation could in some cases cause apprehension. What they really want to know is, how this practice can be adopted in to their current process without having a negative impact on their output? Where companies have a mature agile process, they may be reluctant to try something new which could upset that balance. However, with experienced UX specialists, a highly collaborative team and iterative process we can show you the Lean UX techniques to ensure a better understanding of user needs.
Clifton Green Senior User Experience Consultant, Valtech
Clifton Green is a Senior UX Consultant at Valtech, a leading UK digital consultancy, with over 12 years of experience in User Centred Design experiences. He works with clients to ensure the success of projects by using his knowledge of user-centered design practices, strategic advice, psychology, design thinking, user interface design and lean techniques.
Before jumping in to the world of digital consultancy, Clifton was the Head of Design and User Experience for a group of hugely successful gaming companies who produce cutting edge experiences for mobile, tablet and web based products. Clifton has also worked with many global clients in financial, healthcare, entertainment and retail verticals. Clifton is currently focused on projects within DVLA to integrate Lean UX principles and methods into Agile teams pushing collaboration and enabling internal user insight teams to deliver true user centred experiences.
Kevin Murray Delivery Director, Valtech
Kevin is a Delivery Director at Valtech with 20 years’ experience in the industry.
Passionate about Agile in the Public Sector, Kevin manages and oversees the successful digital transformation of GDS exemplars for the Department of Work and Pensions, including the phenomenally successful Carer's Allowance digital service.
He is also highly regarded as an expert on the subject of Public Sector Agile, and permeates his working life with running for charity.
From day one, Keving has helped in shaping Valtech's approaches to integrating our proven software engineering and agile delivery capabilities with increasing user centricity, user informed development and creative practices.
Estimation in the software development industry is a contentious subject, seemingly a black art that can have serious consequences on the success or failure of a project, and often a business. This talk explores alternative ways and offers a critique of the #NoEstimates movement.
Stuart Arthur Director of Digital Services, Intellectual Property Office (IPO)
Stuart is a technology leader and entrepreneur, with extensive experience in the private and public sectors. He has guided multi-award winning software business Box UK to global success, delivering groundbreaking digital transformation programmes for clients including World Vision, Investec Asset Management, BBC, and Jaguar Land Rover. He has launched several startups that have become sustainable businesses, and has mentored emerging talent including the Alacrity Foundation.
Stuart advocates for a vibrant, empowering, and self-managing working environment. He is passionate about applying agile and lean principles to help transform organisations. He is an advocate of user centred design and high-quality software development practices. He utilises a range of different methods including Lean UX, The Lean Startup, Kanban, Scrum, and XP. His focus is to deliver quality software solutions that delight users as often as possible.
Stuart has a strong interest in the education sector where he co-chaired the ICT Report for Welsh Government, which explored and made recommendations about the future of Computer Science and ICT within Wales. He created one of the first industry-led coding masterclass initiatives for the education sector, working with learners of all ages to promote software development and entrepreneurial skills, which were delivered as a series of progressive workshops guided by software experts.
We’ll never be able to understand large-scale systems from a single snapshotof the code. Instead we need to understand how the code evolved and how the people who work on it are organized. We also need strategies that let us find design issues and uncover hidden dependencies between both code and people. Where do you find such strategies if not within the field of criminal psychology?
This session will reveal the wealth of information that's stored in our version-control systems. You'll learn to predict bugs, detect architectural decay and find the code that is most expensive to maintain. Along the way you'll also see how you evaluate knowledge drain in your codebase, learn the social pitfalls of team work and much more. As a bonus you'll get an introduction to both modern offender profiling and its powerful counterparts in the software world. To achieve this, the session combines research on software evolution with findings from various fields of psychology.
Adam Tornhill Software Consultant, Consultant
Adam combines degrees in engineering and psychology to get a different perspective on the challenges of software. In his role as software consultant, he works as an architect and programmer. Adam also writes open-source software in a variety of programming languages. He’s the author of Your Code as a Crime Scene, has written the popular Lisp for the Web tutorial, and self-published a book on Patterns in C. Other interests include modern history, music and martial arts.
Why should you attend this session? Do you like stories? I bet you just said yes. Do you like coding? Safe bet that again you said yes. Let’s combine the two things you like. We will take you on a trip through the forests of refactoring conditionals, passed the mountains of the golden master, down the river of extracting pure functions and into the mount of decomposition. We will not just tell you the story, you will be able to experience while we live code our way through or passed every obstacle in our way.
Erik Talboom Craftsman, Coach, Co-Learning
Hi, I am Erik and I am a human being. This immediately defines my biggest passion in life: humans and what it means to be human. I love challenging people's current situation, their professional and/or personal status quo. Co-Learning how we can all improve our way of collaborating and working, while having fun at the same time. That is my second passion in life: playing. I play board games, roleplaying games and computer games and I am continuously looking for ways to use these concepts in my professional life as well. Because play does not mean silly, it means fun and motivating.
My professional life is centered around my passion for people and play. I mostly work as coach, both agile and lean as well as technical coach for software craftsmanship and personal coach for deeper psychological understanding. Next to that I try to be the game master as much as possible while facilitating meetings, stimulating collaboration and helping to channel creative energy.
Franzi Sauerwein Apprentice, Codurance
Franziska Sauerwein has been a software developer and consultant for several years. She is an active member of the European Software Craftsmanship community and loves to participate in their unconferences, such as SoCraTes. She organizes local code retreats, hackathons, coding dojos and tech talks. Her passions include Test Driven Development, XP techniques and high quality software development.
Test-driven development (TDD) is an Agile practice that, used correctly, leads to better software quality and fewer defects in code. However, there are many cases where common mistakes crop up, even in teams with established TDD practices. Is TDD failing us or is it us that fail to practice in full the principles of TDD and in effect causing the problem? Join Christos Matskas as he goes through some of the most common mistakes in TDD and find out what you can do to avoid them. Laughing is optional.
Christos Matskas Software Developer, Software Lounge
Christos Matskas has been working as a software developer professionally for the last 11 years. He is the founder and CEO of SoftwareLounge, a software consultancy firm, and co-founder of TowzieTyke an apps development powerhouse. His portfolio includes collaborations with some great companies such as MarkIT, Lockheed Martin and Barclays. Over the years he had the opportunity to work on a numerous exciting projects from mobile apps to data crunching back-end solutions. His blog, https://cmatskas.com, is full with useful tutorials,tips and tricks and reviews about software development and tools. Christos also contributes to Open Source and is a regular speaker at conferences and user groups talking about .NET, the Cloud and software development in general.
With the rise of automation, configuration management and infrastructureas code, sometimes working in operations is only a hair's breadth away from software engineering.
Also, with the rise of the DevOps, there's been great strides in breaking down the barriers between operations and development, getting people out of silos and communicating more.
If that's so, what approaches can we take from from agile development to help operations become more agile and iterate faster?
Legacy code is fear because we fear the unknown. Learn what you need to learn in order to be less scared about legacy code during this talk.
Introduction
This will be a presentation about how you can work fast and safe with existing code. I will present the problem of working with legacy code and some of the solutions I know.
You are a programmer. Someone from the company comes with an idea to add a feature and they are sure this new feature is very easy to add. And it should be. But the code is old. The code is a mess. Nobody in the firm knows any more that part of the system. You need to change that ugly piece of code. You are afraid that you might introduce defects. Legacy code is fear.
During this talk we will discuss a Mantra Against Fear that will consist of the attitude, the tools and the techniques you can use to work fast and safe with existing code. You will learn how you can apply agile software development to messy ugly code.
Target Audience
If you are working as a programmer, tester, technical manager or CTO this talk might be extremely helpful. If you are a manager, trainer, coach you will find out about some ideas that you could implement with the companies you work with.
Process Mechanics
A very clear image of the reason to change the legacy code is essential: fix a bug, add a feature, cover the core system part with tests.
I will explain why not reading legacy code is a lot better because even if we think we are super-smart programmers we never get what legacy code really does when we read it.
One alternate way programmers could understand legacy code is to focus on writing characterization tests. But these characterization tests should be focused on a very thin layer of behavior, we should cover the least amount of code needed for the stated purpose of the change.
Characterization tests can be of several type in the beginning: System Tests, Acceptance tests, Integration tests, Component tests, Contract tests, Unit tests. But we might need to refactor some of the higher order tests, on the tests pyramid, into unit tests.
I will focus why it is essential to go in small steps that seem very unnatural to us. Also the steps may vary depending on the programming language.
Agile Software development can be applied on legacy code if we focus on delivering the value, meaning doing the change needed, and if we let all the rest of the ugly code be the same. It is a challenge for any programmer to leave ugly code behind, but changing it would not bring any value for the moment.
Adrian Bolboaca Software Craftman, Mozaic Works
I try to be a continuous learner and a continuous teacher, because I think good software comes from the skills of the people that are involved in the process, on each and every level. Whenever I write code I focus on reducing domain complexity to obtain maintainable software. I love to develop software that helps companies to improve their business, to implement solutions that improve their internal processes and to motivate teams to use their capabilities to yet another level.
Nearly every software craftsmanship event / conference I’ve attended has one theme: code.
Okay that is over simplifying it, we also talk about design, continuous delivery, pair programming and TDD. But it always comes back to the development of code and how we get it into production.
This sounds sensible doesn’t it? It is “software” craftsmanship after all, we create software with code. Code is great, talking about how to develop and design systems is an integral part of software craftsmanship. However we shouldn’t focus too much on code. Why?
Well the software we develop is becoming increasingly distributed. It involves more servers, more network hops, more data centres, well more distribution than ever before! I think most software engineers can improve them selves by focusing on fundamentals of computing rather than on code and which language to use.
How can we do this? Well let’s swap coding up fizzbuzz and start doing katas like:
Or how about: Write a some software that writes your name to the disk. Really? Well I mean really on the disk, not in some buffer.
Miss coding? Implement two variations of Paxos, or show how 2 phase commit doesn’t work in the case of failures by implementing it in your favourite language and killing processes.
If this sounds interesting then come and hear me rant about how we as software craftsmen need to up our game when it comes to fundamentals of computing. How if we want to evaluate which database or queueing software we are going to use we need to understand computer science e.g TCP, disks, memory and latency.
Christopher Batey Software Engineer, DataStax
Christopher Batey is a Software Engineer by trade and is currently employed by DataStax as a Technical Evangelist for Apache Cassandra. Chris has also worked for Sky, where he helped build their online television platform, and IBM, where he helped develop a variety of messaging products.
He spends a lot of his own time contributing back to the software community. Christopher has a particular interest in building effective automated tests for every scenario, including network failures, database faults and services returning junk. For that reason he built an open source test double for Apache Cassandra: Stubbed Cassandra.
Micro-services and micro-services architecture are the next hype in software development. Websites and blogs are full of introducing posts, the first books are being written and the first conferences organized. There’s big promises of scalability, flexibility and replaceability of individual elements in your landscape. However, when you are knee deep in the mud as a software architect at an insurance, it is very hard to find help on how to design applications and components in a micro-services architecture. During this talk Sander Hoogendoorn, discusses the long and winding road the insurance company where he’s acting as the lead software architect has taken to implement their business processes in a micro-landscape. Sander will show how this company is modeling requirements in a micro-landscape using smart use cases, and will explain the difficulties and the lessons learned, using many real-life examples.
Sander Hoogendoorn Software architect, Independent Consultant
: Sander is an independent dad, mentor, trainer, software architect, programmer, speaker, and writer. He is a highly appreciated catalyst in the innovation of software development at his many international clients. Well known as the author of the best-selling book This Is Agile, Sander coaches organizations, projects and teams, has written books on UML and agile, and published over 250 articles in international magazines. He is an inspiring (keynote) speaker at many international conferences, and presents seminars and training courses on a variety of topics such as (beyond) agile, Scrum, Kanban, software estimation, software architecture, microservices, design patterns, modeling and UML, writing code, and testing.
More Information to follow
Information to follow
Rachel Davies Coach for XP product development teams, Unruly
Rachel Davies is an internationally recognised expert in coaching teams on the effective use of Agile approaches. She is author of the first book on Agile Coaching and an invited speaker at industry conferences around the world.
Rachel has over 20 years experience in software development in a variety of roles from software developer to manager. She has been an agile practitioner since 2000 and utilises a range of agile methods including XP, SCRUM, Lean/Kanban, and DSDM Atern. She has extensive experience facilitating agile meetings and workshops.
Rachel has supported 50+ agile transitions over the last 9 years working with many well-known companies including Agresso, BBC, Egg, Nokia, Screwfix, and uSwitch. Her work regularly involves working with business stakeholders and senior management to understand driving concerns and collaboratively design a custom Agile lifecycle that fits the company culture.
Rachel has a demonstrated track record of strong management and leadership skills. She directed Agile2008 conference in Toronto, the largest ever agile conference with 1500 attendees. Rachel also served on the board of directors of non-profit US based Agile Alliance for 7 years alongside industry thoughtleaders, such as Mike Cohn, Mary Poppendieck, and Ken Schwaber.