TBC

Details

Andy Barker, a Technical Specialist in the Business Intelligence development team at HML in Skipton, will provide an experience report on the team's journey so far in bringing automated testing to data warehousing using Fitnesse and dbFit: what has worked, what hasn't, and what is still proving a challenge. It will include demo's of the tools in action.

[Note: 6:45 start this month only]

Behaviour Driven Development using Cucumber

While tools for Behaviour Driven Development like Rspec in Ruby have been aimed towards programmers and dealing with classes and objects, Cucumber is aimed at filling the communication gap between customers, programmers and testers. In Cucumber we build a personalised plain text domain language to talk about the applications behaviour that non-technical users can understand and write. With Ruby mappings we turn the plain text into executable tests. We'll look at working outside-in with Cucumber and the importance of having a customer's business value as a direction, which helps us drive towards producing the minimal marketable feature. Looking also at how to use Cucumber with various programming languages. And some of the challenges of trying to introduce Cucumber into an agile environment.

Joseph Wilk is a member of the core development team for Cucumber. He has been developing for the web for 10 years in both big and small companies and as an entrepreneur. After stints working with Java and Python he finally found Ruby. He now spends his time in-between eating Cucumbers working at songkick.com. Having more fun than is healthy working as a Software Gardener building web systems and working on open source projects. He suffers from test obsession and has given up hope of any treatment. (http://blog.josephwilk.net/about)



Agile Business Intelligence Testing

Andy Barker, a Technical Specialist in the Business Intelligence development team at HML in Skipton, will provide an experience report on the team's journey so far in bringing automated testing to data warehousing using Fitnesse and dbFit: what has worked, what hasn't, and what is still proving a challenge. It will include demo's of the tools in action.

Registration is now full - you can be placed on a reserve list here

Please note the agileyorkshire venue and date are changed for this meeting. See below for details.

In the last decade or so we've seen a number of new ideas added to the mix to help us effectively design our software. Patterns help us capture the solutions and rationale for using them. Refactoring allows us to alter the design of a system after the code is written. Agile methods, in particular Extreme Programming, give us a highly iterative and evolutionary approach which is particularly well suited to changing requirements and environments. Martin Fowler has been a leading voice in these techniques and will talk about his recent thinking about how these and other developments affect our software development.

Martin Fowler in his own words:

I'm an author, speaker, consultant and general loud-mouth on software development. I concentrate on designing enterprise software - looking at what makes a good design and what practices are needed to come up with good design. I've been a pioneer of object-oriented technology, refactoring, patterns, agile methodologies, domain modeling, the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and Extreme Programming. For the last decade I've worked at ThoughtWorks, a really rather good system delivery and consulting firm.  From http://martinfowler.com/


Where: Upstairs at The Adelphi in Leeds (http://theadelphi.co.uk/)
When: Wed, 17th March. Meet at 6:30 for a 7:00 start.
Cost: Free

Got something cool to show to your peers, some experiences to report or a discussion you want to have. Submit your idea here.

Current proposed topics are:

• REST and OpenRasta
• Silverlight
• F#
• Thoughts on Test Driven Development practices
• Behaviour Driven Development

A social evening.

No fixed agenda but it would be good to get some discussion going around what do we want from the club and where do we want to go with it.

I suspect there will also be some discussion around Lean, Kanban and Systems Thinking.

• David Joyce, BBC Worldwide, Kaban For Software Engineering
• Peter Camfield, BBC Worldwide, Why do we code?

This meeting will be a special end of year event held at Old Broadcasting House (http://www.ntileeds.co.uk/old-broadcasting-house/)

The evening will run from 6:30 until 9:00 with snacks and drinks provided. Afterwards the conversation will continue as we head down to the German Market at Millennium Square for some Bratwurst and mulled wine.

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Kaban For Software Engineering

Details

Kanban focuses on becoming successful, which may lead to being Agile. Lean is a set of principles that are being applied to software engineering by a growing number of practitioners. Kanban is a true pull system implementation in software engineering. The five pillars of Lean, which Kanban fully implements are pull, continuous flow, customer value, waste elimination and continuous improvement. The Principles of Kanban are: to agree a team capacity, to limit WIP (Work in Process) to that capacity, to pull value through the value stream, and to make both work and workflow visible. It has proven easy to adopt and lowers resistance to change. The result is a gradual, incremental approach to change that is empowering for everyone.

Speaker

David is an agile development manager and coach with 12 years technical team management and coaching experience, and 20 years software development experience.
In recent years, using Scrum and XP, David has coached onshore and offshore development teams and successfully launched an internet video startup from inception to launch. David currently works for BBC Worldwide as a Development Manager, coaching teams on Scrum, Lean and Kanban. David is a certified Scrum Master and Lean practitioner. http://leanandkanban.wordpress.com/

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Why do we code?

Details

A group activity which explores the motivations for becoming/being software engineers. By understanding what motivates software developers we can learn more about others and ourselves. In particular we can learn what behaviours software developers should avoid, reduce or increase given our understanding.

Speaker

Peter has been developing software professionally for the last 12 years. His current role as a software developer and coach is focused on improving the quality of the code developed at BBC Worldwide. http://leftshift.wordpress.com/

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Resources from the presentations

Slides

• http://www.slideshare.net/neilbmclaughlin/kanban-overview-and-experience-report-2725593
• http://www.slideshare.net/neilbmclaughlin/david-joyce-journey-to-systemic-improvement

Useful Links from David

Lean software development - Systems Thinking, Mary Poppendieck
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1409811

Systems Thinking Cultural change is free
http://leanandkanban.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/systems-thinking-cultural-change-is-free/

Lean software development - achieving better requirements
http://leanandkanban.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/lean-software-development-achieving-better-requirements/

High level overview of Systems Thinking, Agile and Real Options for the executive level
http://leanandkanban.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/systems-thinking-real-options-agile-principles/

My talk which was filmed, coming soon
http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-scrum/a-journey-to-systemic-improvement-962

Kanban training session
http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-scrum/kanban-for-software-engineering-and-kanban-open-space

Useful links from Pete

Dan North - creator of Behaviour Driven Development explains Features and Scenarios including the Given - When - Then format
http://dannorth.net/whats-in-a-story

This one focuses on a understanding TDD and the reasons for creating BDD
http://dannorth.net/introducing-bdd

He also has a parable on metrics
http://dannorth.net/2009/11/the-lady-in-the-taxi-a-parable-of-metrics

Here a couple of links on Feature Injection - A technique that builds on Dan's original idea
http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/tag/feature-injection/

Photos from "Why Do We Code" session

http://tweetphoto.com/6155393

Why is it so difficult to talk to customers? Why do managers often end up making unrealistic demands on developers and encouraging them to make promises that they can't keep? Why do so many software projects end up in angry exchanges of accusation and counter accusation? Can any of this be explained? Can anything be done to make it better?

Researchers at the "Harvard Negotiation Project" claim that a great deal can be done to make things better. By understanding the structure of "difficult conversations" we can be made aware of the various points at which things can go badly wrong and sometimes avoid them. By understanding our own contribution to the problem we can adopt strategies that give us a chance to actually improve a situation.

Using as examples a particularly "difficult" conversation about the development of a website that I overheard in a cafe, and my own experiences in developing software over the last 15 years, I'd like to explore how understanding the nature of "difficult conversations" and some other basic negotiation strategies can help anybody involved in the business of developing software.

Suitable for:
Suitable for anybody involved in the process of developing, managing or commissioning software.

Speaker


Mark Stringer is a trainer, coach and consultant in the use of Agile methods. He's particularly interested in exploring project management methods that emphasise the human nature of project management, because he thinks they might actually work. (http://www.agile-lab.co.uk/2007/06/agile-lab-people.html)