It’s November, and it seems I haven’t posted anything here since January. Partly that’s because I have a Proper Job™ these days, which means I spend a lot less time writing and blogging. Partly I’ve rediscovered the joy of actually programming, which means I get to spend most of my time hacking on code.
This is something of a catch-up post, bringing you up-to-date with some of the things I”ve been up to and some of the topics I intend to be blogging and writing about.
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I’m delighted to be taking part in a In the brain of… session organised by the folks at SkillsMatter.
When the SkillsMatter folks actually checked inside my brain and heard the rattling noise, they realised I would need some help, so Liz Keogh – BDD pioneer and project lead for JBehave – will be co-presenting with me. (If you hold Liz up to your ear you can hear The Cure.)
SkillsMatter is a fantastic training organisation that believes in creating and nurturing communities. This event kicks off a London BDD community, which is very exciting for me because it means there is a genuine momentum behind BDD as a movement. This is the first of a series of (mostly free) talks around BDD and automated testing taking place throughout the rest of the year.
The event is free to attend and it takes place at SkillsMatter’s London office on Monday 17 August from 6:30 pm. I expect we’ll go for beer afterwards.
Please register online so we know how many chairs to put out, and I look forward to seeing you there.
Next week I’m doing a new talk at the Better Software Conference in Las Vegas about learning models, where I was planning to talk about various learning styles and about how ineffective and systemically flawed most school systems are. Then I read up on Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats model (I’ve linked to Liz Keogh’s write up because it was her who introduced me to it), which I’ve subsequently used to facilitate a workshop, and was amazed to say the least. So much so that it caused me to turn the Learning to Learn talk on its head. I still believe our schools are ineffective and systemically flawed but now I know why! de Bono goes beyond suggesting we should learn how to learn, and suggests ways of learning how to think. These strike at the heart of Western thinking models, which by and large haven’t moved forward since the days of the three amigos of Aristotle, Socrates and Plato, although arguably the scientific method adds something to the mix.
Briefly, five of the six hats represents a different “style” of thinking – yellow is positive, black is critical, green is creative, white is factual and red is emotional – and the idea is to get everyone thinking in the same style at the same time. The sixth blue hat is a kind of meta-hat or “process” hat, which the facilitator wears. You can either run a workshop with a fixed timeline of which hats you will wear when, or you can choose to switch hats reactively during the session when you think a different mode will be more useful or enlightening. The important thing is that everyone is in the same mode at the same time.
Edward de Bono calls this parallel thinking, as opposed to the usual mixed-up scrappy thinking we do most of the time, and has discovered it is far more powerful than the usual dialectic approach of taking a stance and trying to beat the other guy into submission. It also gives you a construct for talking about thinking styles. If someone is being critical or obstructive – usually for what they believe are good reasons – you can describe that as “excellent black hat thinking”, and ask them to note it for the next black hat segment (“but right now we have our yellow hats on, so assuming nothing could possibly go wrong, what would the best possible outcome be for this situation?”). It allows people to feel acknowledged without having the conversation derailed by either defensiveness or emotion. Of course you have to follow through and allow sufficient time with the appropriate hat later on. The same technique allows you to acknowledge and deal with emotive issues in a safe way, rather than pretending to suppress the emotions or risk having them take over.
Liz introduced the six thinking hats in a workshop with a client a few months ago, and I decided I wanted to find out more about it. I discovered that the original Six Thinking Hats book is now available as a Penguin classic, which means you should be able to find it for peanuts in your local bookshop. It’s well worth a read (not least because it finally gave me a decent definition of lateral thinking), and some of the anecdotal evidence is very persuasive – usually involving groups of people reaching consensus far quicker than they expected to.
One of my favourite observations is that often a good answer almost presents itself, and in a non-threatening way. Shifting the emphasis from pitting my idea against your idea to collaboratively trying to find the best idea makes it safer and easier for a group to arrive at a sensible conclusion. It even worked when I split the group of around 20 people into smaller groups (four groups of five, tackling different aspects of the topic). We would all still change hats in sync and it kept the flow going.
Oh, and I found that coloured paper party horns are a great substitute for real hats: they can be heard above a room full of people, and you can wave the hat around to emphasise the new colour.
A friend of mine has a Far Side desk calendar that he describes it as a barometer for how busy he is. Some days he finds himself tearing off a whole bunch of pages because he’s been too busy or distracted to tear one off each day.
I noticed a couple of weeks ago that I haven’t blogged anything for over six months. It’s been hectic. I’m planning to be blogging more over the coming weeks and months. I’ve got a ton of things to write up, ranging from planning and estimation – it’s no wonder we are useless at it – we don’t even know where to start!, to architecture – why you wouldn’t want to go on a date with Maven, by way of build and release engineering – why Ivy means Ant is still the king of cool.
I’m in Sydney at the moment where I’ll be speaking at JAOO Australia which is in a couple of weeks time. It’s like a pocket-sized, portable version of the European JAOO conference. In fact it is two conferences, one in Sydney (May 5-8) and one in Brisbane (May 11-14). There are two days of tutorials and two days of conference proper, and it looks like it’s going to be great fun. Both conferences are small enough (a few hundred people) that there will be ample opportunity to hang out with speakers and ask the questions you really want answered. And buy them beer.
I’ll be Pimping my Architecture and doing tutorials on BDD (principles and methodology) and TDD in Java (technical workshop), the latter with the lovely Erik Doernenburg.
If you can get to either city on those dates I would highly recommend it. As of writing neither event has sold out so there is still time. JAOO is one of the best geek conferences I know, with a great mix of technology (languages and frameworks), methodology (with an Agile flavour), architecture (from cloud to iphone) and soft stuff (Your brain is deceiving you. Yes you. Even though you know it is!)
Next week I’ll be talking about Best Practices, a current favourite topic, at the ExpertZone Developer Summit in Stockholm. Last year I ran a half-day workshop about SOA and gave a keynote with Erik Dörnenburg about simplicity in software, and this year I wanted to do something a little different. So when I heard there was a track called called “People Matters Too” I was keen to get involved.
This talk will be completely non-technical, aimed at anyone interested in how we learn and why we rebel when faced with Yet Another Change Programme.
As an added bonus – for me at least – I’m going to be talking to the Stockholm Javaforum on Tuesday 8th April at 7pm. When I initially agreed to this I thought it would be a handful of geeks hanging out and talking about Java. It turns out they regularly draw around 200 people. And they’ve sold out. Yikes.
I’ve got an hour to talk about the relationship between Domain-Driven Design and Behaviour-Driven Development. I have no idea how I’ll be able to limit that to one hour but I’m going to try my best. This is timely because I am also working on an article explaining my take on DDD and BDD. Honest.
Last October I was privileged to give a keynote talk at the Øredev conference in Malmö, Sweden. It was a late substitution. The original speaker, testing guru James Bach, had to cancel at the last minute for personal reasons. I felt pretty intimidated stepping into his shoes, especially since the other keynote presenters were Joel Spolsky and Andy Hunt, but I figured since no-one had heard of me I’d probably slip under the radar.
James was planning to talk about best practices, and it seems we have similar opinions about them. I would encourage you to read his wonderful blog article where he rigourously deconstructs the phrase1, and then just as eloquently picks apart the arguments of anyone who disagrees. So I thought I would do something around the same topic.
I wrote it up as an article and the kind folks at InfoQ published it, and the Øredev team has put up a video of the talk. (For some reason I can’t get it to work in firefox on ubuntu, but I’m pretty sure the guy on the left is me).
1. I didn’t realise until long after Øredev that he was the author of that article. It made me very happy when I found out.
I’ve been pretty slack at letting people know about upcoming talks. I could blame workload or burnout or any number of other plausible-sounding reasons, but a lot of it is just down to not prioritising very well. I should fix that.
A couple of years ago Joe Walnes and I gave a talk at an XP Day entitled “Awesome Acceptance Testing” (blame Joe for the title). We looked at motivations for acceptance testing and discussed various strategies, tools and techniques. But mostly it was an opportunity to get a bunch of people in a room and find out what they thought and what they were up to in the acceptance testing space.
If you didn’t get to see it and it sounds like fun, we’ll be rerunning the session at SPA 2008 in March. I hope to see you there.
So it’s that time of year again. I’ve got a number of conferences and workshops coming up, ranging over all sorts of topics. I just popped over to Martin Fowler’s site (I’m doing a talk with him this week) and noticed that he has a much more organised setup than me. All his events are in a sidebar and there is a handy link if you want more details. Another idea to go on my to-do pile.
This is the second instalment in ThoughtWorks series of informal sessions aimed at technologists across the spectrum. Although calling it a technology briefing is a bit inaccurate because the title for this one is “How to Sell Agile to your Organisation”, which has far more to do with the themes of people, risk and change than with anything technological.
This is the talk I’ll be presenting with Martin so I can guarantee a lively session. In his own words: “As I detest selling anything to anyone it will be interesting to see how this talk works out.”
Details and registration info are on the ThoughtWorks website.
A lot of Ruby folk seem to have taken to behaviour-driven development. This is almost entirely due to the success of the rspec project, which is in turn due to the enthusiasm and dedication of its developers and the community they have established.
A while back I wrote a story-level BDD framework for Ruby called rbehave which has since been integrated into the rspec project.
I’ll be helping rspec project leads David Chelimsky and Aslak Hellesoy present a workshop entitled A half-day of behaviour-driven development on Rails, where we’ll be demonstrating how rspec helps you write software that is focused on achieving an outcome. It’s at 8:30am on the Monday morning, so make sure you’re there first thing.
Expo-C is one of my favourite events. It’s a small conference in south-east Sweden and it seems to attract an audience that really cares about what they are doing. I’ve done two of them now, on very different topics, and on both occasions I was very impressed with the quality of the attendees and the calibre of the other speakers. (I’m usually the only one there who hasn’t written a book.)
This time they are doing two mini-conferences back to back, in Växjö and then Karlskrona, with a tutorial day and a seminar day (six sessions) in each location. I’ll be running full-day tutorials on BDD in Växjö, and Coaching, Communication and Change in Karlskrona. For the seminar I’ll be talking about bridging the communication gap, based on a keynote I gave with Martin Fowler at QCon earlier this year.
I will also be learning how to pronounce “Växjö”.
This will be my first OOPSLA. I’ve heard a lot about it and I’m a bit intimidated. By reputation it seems a bit more “cerebral” than most conferences. It will also be the first time I’ve ever presented JBehave at a conference. No mean feat considering I started writing it at the end of 2003! There’s perpetual beta for you.
My co-presenter is my ThoughtWorks colleague, friend and cybergoth Liz Keogh, the person responsible for getting JBehave to 1.0. I have huge respect for Liz; she manages to combine software with poetry. This isn’t a pretentious metaphor – she actually does combine software with poetry. She ran a haiku workshop at a previous ThoughtWorks away day that many of the attendees nominated as the highlight of their day. She also writes inspiring and inspired blog articles.
I’m only going because I want to see what Liz does when she’s let loose on a roomful of developers. I reckon we’ll end up writing haiku acceptance criteria.
There are another couple of events in the pipeline that I will blog about nearer the time (January and February next year). After that I’m going to have a bit of a lie down.
Correction: I got the dates wrong for OOPSLA. Thanks Joshua Graham for putting me straight.
_Another correction: My Swedish geography is appalling. Thanks Morgan Persson._
I’ve got a number of tutorials, conference sessions and keynotes coming up over the next few months that I’m very excited about. My themes for this year are behaviour-driven development, SOA for human beings and understanding what simplicity really means. Looking at these, there is an overarching theme about getting different kinds of people talking to each other in plain English (for some value of English).
QCon is the London version of the excellent JAOO conference in Denmark, which has become my favourite technology event of the year (apart from phone upgrade time). They attract world-class presenters to provide sessions varying from the deep technical through to people and process topics, and they’ve done the same with QCon. What’s more, they have managed to resist the lure of the sales-pitch session, which means you get to hang out with other geeks without people trying to sell you stuff. The London event is being run in conjunction with the common-sense guys at InfoQ, and I’m lucky enough to be speaking there.
I’m delivering a keynote with Martin Fowler about the gaping crevasse between what business people ask for and what technical people think they want. I’ve presented with Martin a couple of times before – at least I know I’ll only be the second loudest person in the room.
ThoughtWorks is a “platinum sponsor”, which I think means we get to buy more drinks than the other sponsors.
ACCU is a conference by geeks, for geeks. With its roots in the C++ community, there are lots of strange people in weird industries like embedded systems, graphics engines and writing music software. It’s a refreshing change for me, where “enterprise systems” usually means moving data from over here to over there.
I’m actually at ACCU by accident, presenting behaviour-driven development in Ruby. They haven’t noticed yet that I haven’t touched C++ in ten years, and I’m not about to tell them.
However, the ACCU folks are developing a strong liking for dynamic languages – last year Guido van Rossum, the inventor of Python, delivered a keynote, and I co-presented a session introducing Ruby and Rails. So perhaps there’s life after the standard template library after all :)
You know the tutorial days that tend to happen either side of a conference? Well Expo-C has adopted the model of having mostly tutorial days and hardly any conference! The 23rd and 25th are tutorial days, with two speakers presenting full-day tutorials on each day (I’m on the 23rd). The middle day is made up of seminars by a number of presenters. As the only speaker who hasn’t published a book (one of the presenters, Jim Coplien, has a small library to his name), I can safely say it’s a very solid line-up. Also, it’s one of the smaller conferences so there is lots of opportunity to hang out with the presenters.
I presented a tutorial day last year around the theme of agile delivery and thoroughly enjoyed it. This year I’m doing something a bit different, focusing on “Change, Coaching and Communication”, using NLP and life coaching principles as the basis of a one day interactive workshop. As with last year, there won’t be any PowerPoint, mostly because I’m rubbish with PowerPoint.
I’ll also be presenting a behaviour-driven development session on the seminar day.
I’ve not been to ROOTS before but I’ve heard good things about it. It’s a developer-centric conference and this year it features the likes of Kevlin Henney, Jim Coplien (who I’ll be racing to Norway from Expo-C) and lovely testing guru Linda Rising.
Erik Doernenberg and I are delivering a keynote on the nature of simplicity, and we’re running a three hour workshop looking at SOA for human beings.
I met Josefin Andersson, one of the organisers of ExpertZone, earlier this year and she convinced me I had to attend the ExpertZone Developer Summit in Stockholm. Since I’m scared of Josefin, I said yes. Also Microsoft’s Beat Schwegler will be there, and he rocks.
I’ll be delivering another keynote with Erik Doernenberg, based on our current pet themes of simplicity and clarity of intent (honestly, how hard can software be?), and running the workshop on SOA for humans.
I’ve been told by the Boss that I’m not allowed out of the house in June.
I am lucky enough to have been invited to present at Expo-C, a software architecture conference based in Carlskrona, Sweden. The dates are 16th to 19th May 2006.
At the risk of dropping names, last year’s conference included sessions by the likes of Rod ‘Spring’ Johnson, Rickard Oberg and Jimmy Nilsson, and this year’s line-up includes, well, take a look for yourself.
In a moment of insanity, the organisers have given me a whole day to play with, the Tuesday, – so I’ll be running a number of sessions with an agile theme, rounded off with a retrospective. I’m going to see how little PowerPoint I can get away with. I’m aiming for Zero Slides.
The rest of the conference is packed with seminars, a panel session, tutorials and they’ve even squeezed in some Open Spaces. A small conference that looks like being a lot of fun – spaces are strictly limited and apparently Carlskrona is beautiful at this time of year.
