DanNorth.net

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.

BDD and DDD at Stockholm Javaforum

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.

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 strip poker pc gameinternet spieleholdem poker regelnonline poker anbieteronline poker für anfängerregeln für pokerwww poker net deholdem poker gameonline poker auf deutschholdem poker downloadtexas holdem poker onlinepoker game netpoker regeln raisepoker softwarewww texas holdempc game poker texaskostenlose online spiele pokertexas holdem gratispoker spiel setonline poker depoker gratis vollversionpoker browser gamepoker spielepoker flash gameparadise poker bonusonline seven card studpoker americano gratistexas holdem online gratispoker texas holdem gratisgratis giocare a poker onlinetexas holdem gratis7 card stud online7 card stud gratisvideo poker gratispoker flash on linewww super poker comtorneo pokergiochi omaha poker in lineapoker 5 draw,draw poker,draw poker on linestreep poker gratistexas holdem no limitpoker roomgioca a poker gratispoker in tourtornei di poker onlinepoker on line multiplayergiochi omaha pokergioca pokertexas holdem rulesplay wize poker at SPA 2008 in March. I hope to see you there.

It’s now about two weeks to OOPSLA, where Liz Keogh and I will be presenting a workshop on behaviour-driven development using JBehave. This will be along similar lines to the workshop I co-presented at RailsConf Europe last month.

At RailsConf we presented to nearly 200 people, which was about a quarter of the conference attendees. At JAOO last year Niclas Nilsson and I presented BDD to well over 100 people. So far at OOPSLA only a handful of people have signed up for the workshop. I’m curious. Is it that the people attending OOPSLA aren’t interested in behaviour-driven development? Is it JBehave? Is it that we haven’t marketed it very well? Is it simply the cost?

RSpec, the ruby equivalent of JBehave, is comparatively much more popular. It has been embraced by the Rails crowd and by rubyists in general in a way that JBehave doesn’t seem to have been in java. Perhaps JUnit and JMock were already so pervasive in the agile java community that there wasn’t room for JBehave, or perhaps it wasn’t seen as different enough to be worth trying – its early incarnations were as just another TDD and mocking tool.

Since I started writing JBehave back in 2003, BDD – and JBehave itself – has broadened in scope, covering user stories right the way through to tested, deployed code, and the OOPSLA workshop will explore this bigger picture. It will be of interest to anyone looking to understand behaviour-driven development, regardless of the technology stack or toolset you use.

On a related theme, java is trailing behind ruby and even C# in terms of customer-friendly executable documentation. JBehave might just be the tool to follow through on the promise of FIT, to define executable acceptance criteria that can be authored by testers or analysts.

So to anyone going to OOPSLA, if you aren’t coming to the BDD session I would be very keen to hear why so I can pitch it better next time. Is it that you aren’t using JBehave so you don’t think the session is relevant? Are you simply not interested in BDD? Is there too much other good stuff on at the same time? Or did you just not notice but now you have you’ll be signing up? I hope to see you in Canada!

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.

ThoughtWorks Quarterly Technology Briefing

• Manchester – 12 September 2007 <-- That’s this week!
• London – 20 September 2007

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.

RailsConf Europe

• Berlin – 17-19 September 2007

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 Roadshow

• Växjö – 15-16 October 2007
• Karlskrona – 17-18 October 2007

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”.

OOPSLA

• Montreal – 21-25 October 2007

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.

And some others…

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.

From the session summary:

The Ruby language has taken the development world by storm. Its combination of clean, object-oriented syntax (everything is an object) coupled with Perl-like platform independence and inline text processing power make it a useful tool both for writing small utilities and as a rapid prototyping language. The popular web framework, Ruby-on-Rails, allows for easy development of highly-functional web applications.

This session will explore these aspects of Ruby, namely for utilities, prototyping and web development. We will also discuss issues such as scalability and deployment.

Intended audience: experienced developers who are curious about what Ruby has to offer, and want a fair appraisal and introduction without all the hype.

I promise there will be no powerpoint and lots of interactive stuff.