Better Best Practices at Øredev

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 rigorously 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).