Getting Agile

I spent the last weekend attending the best conference in the land, No Fluff Just Stuff. If you haven‘t been to this Friday-Sunday event, go to it when it‘s in your town. There are no vendors to derail you into web services or ESB. Just good ol‘ software development tools, howtos, and methodologies.

Right from the start, I must state that I think David Hussman is the best speaker that I have seen. Besides the incredible amount of information that he delivered in his presentations regarding agile methodologies such as XP and Scrum, he also created an amazing feeling within the room with his presence. If you are even semi-interested in agile methodologies you should attend one of his talks. I think that it could be the talk which takes you over the wall to running your projects agile.

On Saturday, I attended a BOF session on software architecture with Mark Richards of IBM and Neal Ford of ThoughtWorks hosting. We had a magnificent conversation about what we do as software architects. I was most impressed that the concepts of test-driven development was brought up during this conversation and used as a basis for technical architecture. Lately, I have been involved with colleagues who have introduced me to Fit which is a tool for “enhancing collaboration during software development”. It is used by tools such as Fitnesse and Selenium to create acceptance tests using a library of fixtures for things such as web, .NET, and Java applications. They allow a team to work with their customer on creating acceptance test criteria which will show when your user stories have been completed. This can be a very liberating tool for software developers when faced with tight deadlines with continually moving release dates.

A buzz was eminating from the speakers regarding Ruby. Since many of the speakers are quite influential in the open source development domain there may be a flash flood of Ruby work in the near future. Considering the capabilities of Ruby in the real world, I can't see it becoming a sustained movement. Konstantin Ignatyev posted a great message on the Seattle Java users group mailing list with details regarding this topic which I entirely agree with.

All in all, this was a great conference. I could not do it justice to regurgitate what I heard and learned at this conference. When it comes to your town, just attend. You won‘t be disappointed.