Details

TBC

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.

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)

Details

In this session, Ralph will provide an overview of some techniques that bring Agility into the world of testing. (The world of testing is a strange place: regarded by most people as a nice place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there, it is an unmapped wilderness where the waterfall methodology still roams unfettered.)

The main focus will be on one such technique, Exploratory Testing. It is defined by many as "simultaneous learning, test design and test execution", but Ralph will attempt to be more helpful. After the presentation many of you will claim this is what you have been doing all along, but now it has a fancy name you can use it without shame and companies can sell you high-priced consultancy in it.

Speaker

Ralph Williams is a Test Consultant at the Yorkshire Building Society, based in Bradford. The Society develops much of the application software used throughout its 140 branches and offices, and Ralph is responsible for managing the testing for some of these systems. He has previously worked in various management, testing and development roles at Erudine, Wanadoo and British Telecom, and specialises in Agile Testing and chocolate.

Details

Agile software development has many very common-sense ideas in it, but if it was all common-sense we'd have been using it long ago. Agile also contains counter-intuitive ideas: paradoxes that make it hard for people accept. For example, the notion that we go fast BECAUSE we take quality to the max is paradoxical for people. They are used to having to trade off speed and quality. On the other hand the idea that those who do the work are best placed to estimate it is seen as perfectly sensible. How can a coherent design emerge if design is done one iteration at a time? Another paradox. But it's easy to accept that when you build a system iteratively, you can learn more quickly from your experiences - that's common sense. We’ll explore the 5 other paradoxes, and you’ll see how a grasp of these helps you to take your agile practices to the next level.

For next weeks Agile Yorkshire meeting we have 2 presentations and a discussion planned.

* Agile War Stories: A Project Managers Perspective. Ian Carroll, (http://www.solutioneers.co.uk)
* User Story Estimation: Alan Williams
* Lean/Kanban Discussion: An open discussion to pull together what we know about Lean and Kanban in software development and to discuss what it means to us as participants in the software development process.

An audience-participation exercise in which the audience must completely build a product using XP principles, like pair programming, story writing and estimation. For the exercise "build" here means that the developers will draw a picture of the desired product incrementally. The audience is broken down into groups, the members of each group take on different roles (such as "developers" or "stakeholders") and there are certain rules in place to mimic what it's like to work on an XP project.

There are good overviews of an Extreme Hour here and here.

It's something that's used by XP consultants to explain the methodology. Hopefully it'll be interesting and quite fun.

See you there.

Details

This talk will introduce Slim, the most important upgrade to FitNesse in years. Slim is the new test runner which promises to bring platform interoperability, easier integration, a much simpler programming model and lots of small helpers that will allow us to write and maintain executable specifications and acceptance tests easier. This is a session for .NET and Java developers. Some prior exposure to FitNesse and FIT would be beneficial, but not required.

Note: This talk will start at 6:30 sharp.

Speaker

Gojko Adzic is a software craftsman with a passion for new technologies, programming and writing. He runs Neuri Ltd, a UK-based consultancy that helps companies build better software by introducing agile practices and tools and improving communication between software teams, stakeholders and clients. See http://gojko.net/about/ for more details.

Update

We currently have short talks planned on:

• Pex
• UI Development using MVP
• Agile Client Management
• User Stories
• Story Point Estimating For Release Planning.

There may be others added on the night.

Should be good, see you there.

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An evening of short talks (<= 10 mins) from the members on a wide range of subjects.

The aim is to have short presentations which drill down into a subject and which aim to give the audience an introduction and to deliver a couple of key points without getting sidetracked into detail. The emphasis for the talks is on simplicity - no fancy powerpoint presentations are necessary and unprepared presentations are OK (even encouraged!).

The floor is open to all so if you would like do a presentation on a cool technology or methodology you have used then drop an email to me neil.mclaughlin@agileyorkshire.org so we can prepare a list in advance.

This is a great opportunity to practice your presentation skills with a friendly audience. Go on, what have you got to lose!

A laptop, projector and flipchart will be available.

Note: Ben Hall's Pex Presentation has been postponed

This will be an introduction to the what, why and how of TDD by way of a practical demonstration with plenty of chance for discussion/heckling.

The pair presenters will be Adam Pridmore and Neil McLaughlin who are software developers at Masternaut ThreeX. They are part of a team which has been practicing agile software development for several years in sunny Skipton.

• 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