Author: Craig Smith

YOW! Nights: Extracting Gold from Legacy Code

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YOW! 2011Last month, Dave Thomas came to Brisbane for YOW! Nights to deliver his always insightful and entertaining presentation entitled “Mature Legacy Seeking Sexy New Technology for Fun and Profit: Extracting Gold from Legacy Code”. It’s been a pleasure to work with Dave on the last couple of Agile Australia conferences and I always try to make sure I catch his presentations when he is in town.

The following are my notes from the session:

  • a common complaint is that my boss does not let me do anything neat – legacy is a challenge
  • go where there is a big need rather than wherever everybody is – solve a problem that is important to them in a clever way
  • legacy code is code that has no tests
  • only if you have a product that matters you will have legacy – you can make bloatware even in new systems
  • legacy – the big ball of mud – OO is one of the biggest creators of technical debt
  • developers are the source of legacy debt – the developer solution is we can always rewrite it in my language – most rewrites fail
  • outsourcing often works short term – but you lose your business knowledge and you realise your requirements stink
  • vendor solution – start with a technology you don’t need
  • agile solution – just refactor it, there are no tools or practices that can fix millions of lines of code, it will take forever
  • need to figure out what the legacy is about – get the metaphor and a picture – write stories and put them on a wall, invest in getting the legacy programmers to sit down and talk about it
  • most companies are living on their legacy – new products are not paying the way
  • pair legacy and non-legacy developers to tackle the problem
  • use modern IDE, use modern SCM, new continuous build infrastructure is cheap, need fewer developers if your whole world is in memory
  • when everybody is using agile, how can it be the best practice – it is the only practice
  • prove your way through the old systems – there are very few greenfield projects
  • do TDD using live transaction roll back
  • automate from the data definition not screen scrape
  • people only do innovation when they are screwed – agile is predictability and quality not productivity
  • rewrite the contracts so that vendors can only install if they have automated acceptance tests – acceptance tests are the only way of putting two distinct processes together
  • big resource contracts should be split because the quality of resources are usually spilt in half – give it to local resources who have the talent
  • an agile coach is “an unemployed Smalltalk programmer”
  • think outside of the box – use spreadsheets to load data to the cloud
  • simple innovation in a difficult problem gets you a lot of respect – don’t ask your boss if you should write some Prolog to solve a problem
  • look where the customers are spending money – it is usually in legacy
  • lots of great opportunities to make a difference to hold your nose with the legacy smell – find where the biggest bang for buck is quickly – need to do it in months
  • KLOCs kill – more code to maintain
  • prove new ideas and do a little bit at a time

Agile Academy Meetup: The journey of becoming Agile or even more Agile

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MeetupAgile AcademyA few weeks ago, the Agile Academy held its February 2011 meetup, with three speakers and a panel discussion on agile adoption in different organisations. There was a good turnout to hear the 3 speakers:

Here are my notes from the short sessions.

Adrian Smith (Ennova)

Ennova is a startup in the engineering space:

  • start with an idea or a better way of doing something as well as good people and customers
  • get an idea, develop it as quickly as possible, give it to your customers and learn
  • use low-fi tools: story wall, Pivotal Tracker, user personas and scenarios, build prototypes but enforce rules such as “can’t give this to the customer” or “no tests”, offshore remote pairing with Skype and iChat, version control using GitHub, continuous integration using Hudson, testing using Cucumber and RSpec, one-click deployment in Hudson and EC2 test grid, communications with Campfire and Yammer for chat and retrospectives using Listhings
  • started with the culture in mind, set principles and hire the right people
  • whole business needs to be agile, focus on technical quality important

Nigel Waddington

Nigel relayed his experiences from setting up Agile at a large software organisation:

  • don’t believe case studies, every customer is different
  • it’s all about yoghurt! – cultural change is hard – need leadership involved plus bottom up engagement
  • leaders care about money – “show me the proof that waterfall works!”, they want predictability and reporting and to make money
  • ran pilots to show success – choose good duration, start small and grow and make sure it has executive buy-in, don’t choose pieces of work that are too easy
  • pilots are good to engage people – train, educate, seed teams – get them to push and make it happen
  • balance between fast and evaluation
  • eat your own dog food, “iterating towards agility” (Mike Cohn), use a virtual scrum team for transition
  • don’t mess with the Scrum basics in the beginning
  • remember you go to work to deliver software, not to do Scrum

Elio Patane (WorkCover Queensland)

WorkCover Queensland is a workers compensation insurance company:

  • weren’t delivering quickly enough resulted in reduced confidence from the business
  • wanted to be agile, but not capital “A” Agile – did not want to lose sight of goals
  • started with customers breaking down projects to deliver value
  • solution delivery framework – Idea -> Discussion -> Plan -> Build -> Implement
  • needed to improve communication around intent of project – created a “project picture” to give context
  • found out that they did not know enough about stories – started too early – more in planning phase
  • standups – walk the wall, back to front rather than the 3 questions as they missed the picture of progress
  • ATDD using Cucumber and Watir – testers break the build, just like developers
  • one floor, open plan environment
  • big release walls – give management a view
  • can now to deliver to Production every 3 weeks and high quality

Panel Discussions

The panel discussions covered some awesome questions from the audience. As I was lucky enough to be asked to moderate the panel, I did not get the opportunity to record any notes from this session.

Sydney Go Inaugural Meetup January 2011

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Google GoI got along to the “Googleplex” when I was in Sydney the other week, and with Steve Dalton checked out the inaugural Go Meetup. I have spent very little time looking at Go, so was interested to get some background into what it is all about.

Andrew Gerrand gave (part) of a talk on Practical Go Programming (I say part because it turned out to be a discussion with the slides rather than the talk). The slides are available here, but the talk is available as a recording from OSDC 2010.

Steve Dalton also interviewed Andrew Gerrand on the Coding By Numbers podcast earlier in the day, which is well worth a listen.

CDS43: 2010 Review

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The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 5,200 times in 2010. That’s about 13 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 37 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 71 posts. There were 4 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 406kb.

The busiest day of the year was September 2nd with 114 views. The most popular post that day was Agile 2010 Day 2 Review.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were twitter.com, infoq.com, ow.ly, unimplemented.blogspot.com, and linkedin.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for aaftt, alec sharp, apple application development training, ubuntu set java_home, and aa-ftt.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Agile 2010 Day 2 Review August 2010
1 comment

2

Apple iPhone Management & Web Application Development Training July 2010
1 comment

3

Atlassian Summit 2010 Day 1 Wrapup June 2010
3 comments

4

AAFTT Workshop 2010 (Orlando) August 2010

5

Agile Australia 2010 Day 1 Review September 2010
3 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

Agile Academy Meetup: A is for Agile, the start of something good!

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MeetupAgile AcademyIt’s that time of year where you start to clear the decks for the next year, and, in amongst a bunch of files on my hard disk, I found my notes from the Agile Academy Meetup from April 2010 in Brisbane, which I thought had been long lost to binary heaven.

At this meetup, Phil Abernathy presented an introductory agile session entitled “A is for Agile, the start of something good!” He had some good some refreshing points, and some of my notes from the session are here:

  • why change – better, faster, cheaper – key driver, but customers have always wanted this even before the Global Financial Crisis
  • RAD – “the good old days”
  • agile is evolutionary – developed over time from RAD, XP, Scrum, etc…
  • pendulum swing from waterfall to agile is a bad approach
  • agile is made up of values and principles plus technology, social and management practices
  • values and principles are not enough, so the only way to implement these are practices – social, technology and management
  • being accountable is a key value, but gets harder as agile teams work closely together, so you also need courage, respect & honesty as well
  • wisdom of the crowd is always better than the best person in the group
  • simplicity is the most difficult principle to implement – humans always want more detail
  • self organization does not mean no leadership – it means even more leadership
  • if you get kickoff of your project wrong, it will always go wrong (regardless of waterfall or agile)
  • agile successful in non-software development projects – biggest demand in Suncorp is from the business
  • benefits linked to outcomes which are linked to features which are then linked to stories
  • agile is different to RAD because we don’t prototype, we build… iteratively
  • in agile we don’t write documentation until we have shared understanding, but there is a discipline to the amount and the need to refactor
  • issues with agile adoption are usually on the IT side of the fence, once the business have seen it they will be the biggest supporters

Phil then answered some questions from the audience:

  • PRINCE2 now has a large agile component to it – is no different because agile sits on top of it – agile has rigour and will work with any project management method
  • governance – heartbeat of the steering commitee must be the same heartbeat as that of the project
  • selling agile – you need troaching – training and coaching together, it’s a change management journey
  • don’t expect a successful agile project to sell agile in the organisation, you will get resistance – need to manage transition from pilot to scaling, need buy-in to the pilot to avoid this
  • where do you put agile artefacts when you don’t have walls – mobile whiteboards, walls, a company in San Francisco just got seed funding for agile walls
  • do not recommend using a tool over tangible materials

YOW! 2010 Australia Day 2 Review

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YOW! 2010Day 2 of the YOW! Australia software development conference in Brisbane, the following are my notes from the sessions that I attended.

Keynote: Exploring NoSQL

Erik Meijer delivered this keynote, which essentially proved that relational databases and NoSQL are mathematical opposites. The slides are available here.

  • “NoSQL took away the relational model and gave nothing back” – Benjamin Black
  • SQL is complicated and not very efficient
  • principle of compositionality
  • SQL and NoSql are opposites mathematically

Leveraging Internet Technologies to Build a New Breed of Software Development Tools

Martin Nally from IBM delivered this talk on development tools and RDF, his slides are available here.

  • 78% of people cite delivery pressure as to why they don’t use ALM
  • vendors believe their tool is the centre of the universe – if that is the case you need to know the universe
  • AD/Cycle tried a central repository model in 1990 – did not work, but most vendors still trying to this
  • currently we try to use the integrated model
  • third option is to use the world wide web and linked data (Tim Berners Lee) – give everything an URI, use HTTP URI so people can look them up, provide useful information on lookup (RDF), include links to other URIs – this is just REST!
  • “tools are just a prison for data”
  • we still build tools like we built applications in the 50’s – need all the data
  • RDF – universal data representation for the web, SPARQL is the RDF query language – XML looks awful for RDF, Ntuples is much easier
  • open-services.net – community around linked data for tools
  • focus on the integration scenarios because you will never get two customers to agree on the specifics of a test tool
  • friends don’t let friends represent data in XML
  • URLs should last forever – use virtual names, don’t tie to machines and don’t put meaning into URLs because it will change

iPhone & Android: From Concept to Delivery

Nathan de Vries spoke about iPhone iOS development and Daniel Bradby spoke about Android development, the slides are available here.

  • Australia has had abnormal adoption of the iPhone
  • design is a very important part of the platform
  • Apple publishes Human Interface Guidelines
  • aesthetic integrity – don’t want design to get in the way, match aesthetics to the type of application
  • direct manipulation – feel like you are interacting with the objects on the screen
  • metaphor – mapping design back to real life
  • consistent – apple provides a base framework – navigation, view, tab bar controller
  • start raw with ideas on big bits of paper, constraints of device means you need to be very iterative
  • when designing screens remember the different screen resolutions between the iPhone 3GS (480 x 320), iPhone 4 (960 x 640) and iPad (1024 x 768)
  • use vectors when designing images so that they scale down nicely
  • use the simulator but do not under estimate the value of testing on the device
  • testing tools not built into the culture but are gaining prominence (GHUnit and Cedar)
  • suggest that you always develop with the latest SDK for the latest devices and patches
  • use iOS Beta Builder to test with up to 100 users on real devices
  • use analytics to get real usage of your applications, 80% of apps are use once and 95% are abandoned after one month
  • track reviews but don’t take them to heart
  • Android is developed by the Open Handset Alliance, which includes a large number of developers, telcos and manufacturers, of which Google is just one
  • Dalvik is the Java virtual machine that runs on Android handsets
  • The Android IDE is built on top of Eclipse

The Emergence of UX in an Agile World

Victor Rodrigues and Xerxes Battiwalla from Cochlear spoke about combining agile and UX, their slides are available here.

  • agile came from internal IT projects, but UX came from consumer commercial products
  • experience needs to be designed
  • many user experiences are broken
  • a great resource is 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web
  • start with a backlog
  • with UX you need to look at the entire system
  • decided that UX and development went separate ways and proceeded in two different stream
  • incrementally develop in a series of internal drops
  • 3 stages of UX evolution – idea storming (consider all options and dismiss them), prototyping (let designers choose their tools) and user testing (ease of use, makes sense, sketchy UI)
  • develop the UI after interaction has been defined, so start by developing the plumbing
  • designers and developers should use their own tools but talk a common language (markup)
  • MVVM – model – view – view model

Management 2.0: Leadership Models for an Information Age

Richard Durnal from realestate.com.au delivered this session, the slides are available here.

  • ChangingMinds.org – leaders vs managers
  • How I Learned to Let My Workers Lead – Ralph Stayer from Johnsonville Sausage in the Harvard Business Review
  • PARC(T) model – from The Modern Firm by John Roberts – People, Architecture, Routines, Culture and Technology
  • code wars
  • point kaizen (optimize points in the process)
  • flow kaizen (optimize the entire flow)
  • theory of constraints – keep working on the one problem that is causing you the most pain
  • systems management.theory helps bridge the gap from agile
  • kaizen vs kaikaku – kaizen only gets you so far because you see a slide, sometimes you need to introduce massive change
  • you can inspire people but they need to bring their own motivation
  • transforming REA – great people, cross functional teams, visual controls, agile and lean concepts, engineering practices, DevOps and hearts and minds
  • build a compelling vision (where do we want to go and follow)
  • decentralize responsibility and let go of control (people aren’t grasping in the way we expected, developers don’t grasp the business, take time to go out on sales calls, barriers they think are there are not really there)
  • work on the culture and the system
  • build a great environment (productivity gain has been huge)
  • look for trouble makers and throw them into teams with no trouble (wisdom of the crowd)
  • take risks, learn and move on

Row Together, Row in the Right Direction, Row Faster: Improving alignment and throughput in software development

Jason Yip delivered this talk, the slides are available here.

  • the best programmers are 10 times  better than average which is 10 times  better than worse
  • set the best performers as the standard (not the second worst performer) , teams only as strong as weakest link
  • need explicit time for performance and practice
  • lower threshold for incidents, raise threshold for incident response (fix the problem)

Forty Years of Fun with Computers

Dan Ingalls took us on a 40 year journey of his life in computing including Smalltalk 76 and 80, SqueakVM and Lively Kernel.

YOW! 2010 Australia Day 1 Review

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YOW! 2010The YOW! 2010 Australia software development conference was held in Melbourne and Brisbane a few weeks ago. With a huge thanks to my good friend Nicholas Muldoon from the GreenHopper team at Atlassian, I had the privilege of attending the Brisbane conference. The following are my notes and thoughts from day one of the conference.

 

Extreme Java Productivity: Enterprise Applications in Just Minutes

Ben Alex from VMWare SpringSource gave this presentation on Spring Roo. This talk was one of the a-ha moments for me, as I really have not spent much time looking at Roo until now, and I was quite impressed with where they have taken this product. The slides are available here.

  • wanted to build productivity tool for Java developers
  • development time only, runtime stack is Spring
  • code generator active and passive
  • goal was not needing to read the manual
  • use ‘hint‘ and tab to help you setup the project basics
  • ‘controller all‘ to get a web tier
  • Roo keeps a log and this can be replayed as a script
  • web tier is using Spring MVC – 35% of Java developers use Spring MVC, the rest still use Struts or a mix-and-match
  • can run Roo without an IDE, if you do you need to you can install the AspectJ plugin
  • minimal approach means Roo starts by creating a JAR and only creates a WAR when you need to create a web tier
  • easy to throw away Roo if no longer want it (can also re-add it if you wish)
  • ‘database reverse engineer‘ to incrementally keep up with the database changes
  • can deploy to Google App Engine with one command, same with VMWare

Rails in the Large: How We’re Building (One of) the Largest Rails Apps in the World (for an Enterprise)

Neal Ford is always entertaining and in this talk he shared some learning from a large Rails development project. His slides are available here.

Neal started the talk with a visualisation of the activity on the project Subversion repository using Codeswarm. This is really cool but hard to explain, so here is a similar video of the Eclipse codebase. Look for the explosions, which are essentially big commits for releases.

  • the pursuit – inception phase / iteration 0 – 2 to 6 weeks
  • ove.com – asked Thoughtworks to build in .NET or Rails because existing developers were Java!
  • started with 2 developer pairs and added 2 developer pairs every week until they had 11 developer pairs, 8 BA’s and 6 QA’s
  • found that they needed more BA’s to pairs because of the ability to move through code quicker in Rails, traditionally about has about 3 pairs to 1 BA in Java
  • demonstration trumps discussion, don’t convince on technology too early
  • 3:1 ratio of test code to production code, typical for Rails
  • when living on a submarine, have fun!
  • run 8,996 unit tests in 4 seconds using unit-record
  • rule: unit tests don’t hit the database, mock and stub everything (under 1 minute) – fight the battle to keep tests fast and invent stuff if you need to
  • functional tests on the other hand can’t use stubs, run 3,964 tests in 248 seconds (under 5 minutes)
  • DeepTest – realised that tests were only using one core, so parallelised the tests – want to hear fans running on the machine!
  • Distributed DeepTest – use underutilised BAM’s (Bad Ass Machines) to run tests across the network
  • key to agile software development is feedback loops
  • Selenium Grid, used for User Acceptance Testing, problem is Selenium is really slow – took 8 hours sequentially, on grid was just over 2 hours
  • use continuous integration for lots of things that need automation (CruiseControl.rb)
  • VMWare Fusion to run dedicated applications locally
  • use green / blue infrastructure for deployment, means you test on real hardware and you have a rollback in parallel
  • project Mingle on the wall so there is a common canonical view
  • cc_board – clear view of status without needing to scroll – information radiator
  • jukebox.rb – plays a song when the build breaks, play a theme song upon successful checkin
  • pairing stations – installed Adium, no email because it is poison to developer productivity, use machine names and add the pair names to the status, laptops for personal machines
  • setup internal Jabber chat rooms
  • used API’s to update Mingle status on successful checkin
  • software is more about communication than technology
  • 100% pair programming
  • have fun, work does not have to suck!
  • automate everything – do something that is painful more often that will force you to automate
  • 1 click command to deploy to any development
  • canonical pairing stations using radmind (Linux and OSX) to keep all the machines in sync, some overhead but better than keeping 11 machines up-to-date by hand
  • for messaging started with message.rb as it was good enough, then moved to Starling when they needed it and understood what it would be used for
  • use external tests to check that external services still work
  • performance – use custom hand tuned SQL to do things like forcing indexes
  • upgrading is hard, don’t put it off for too long
  • you can solve anything with rock, paper, scissors and when you get really good you should check out worldrps.com

Integrated Tests Are A Scam

J. B. Rainsberger led this excellent talk on integrated tests. His blog posts (and the summary on InfoQ) on this subject go into a lot more detail. Finally his slides were impressive as they were drawn in real-time using an iPad.

  • slow – delays feedback which means more mistakes and more integrated tests
  • brittle
  • misleading
  • viral
  • corresponding collaboration and contract tests
  • the client always owns the interface
  • basic correctness – each layer talks to the next layer correctly

Testing Your Javascript

Corey Haines delivered this talk, which I blindly hoped would give an answer to the age-old question on how to deal with JavaScript (there was no sliver bullet though). His slides are available here.

  • has a bad name because it is just a scripting language
  • hard to test, no good tools
  • pain in testing means your design has problems – good design means it’s testable
  • tools – Jasmine, QUnit, JsUnit, JSpec, should.is
  • BDD – not tool specific, concept specific, feature level tests driving example level isolation tests
  • 4 rules of simple design (Kent Beck) – tests pass (you need to be able to verify it works), no duplication (knowledge has only one representation), reveals intent (name your objects / variables well) and small
  • SOLID principles – next level above the four rules for good design
  • design guidelines – stratified design (layer cake design), find canonical representation of your data and get away from the DOM and wrap these with builders and behaviors

Domain Modeling with Processes – Adventures of an “object head” in Erlang land

Kresten Krab Thorup delivered this talk which walked through the challenges of developing Erjang (Erlang on the JVM). His slides are available here.

  • Java designed in the client server age – coordination happened in the database
  • Erlang is a perfect domain specific language for event driven programming
  • patterns to ensure system is reliable
  • build reliable systems in the presence of errors – isolation + concurrency
  • emulator + BIF (built in functions) + OTP framework
  • Kilim – coroutines and asynchronous processing for Java

Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

Michael Nygard delivered this talk which detailed some of the content from his book Release It!

  • author of Release It! plus 3 other books including Beautiful Architecture, 97 Things Every Software Architecture Should Know and the Java Developers Reference
  • failure is everywhere and it costs a lot
  • five nines equates to 25 seconds downtime per month – planned and scheduled – impossible!
  • average availability is 88% (3.6 days) for JEE applications
  • since 2004, most security attacks are now at the application level not the operating system level
  • QA tests functional requirements, non-functional testing is timely and costly, we don’t test for longevity of under production load
  • observed availability and stability over time
  • increased interest in DevOps – dev2ops and devopscafe are excellent resources

Keynote: 50 in 50

Richard P. Gabriel and Guy Steele delivered this keynote that covered 50 language lessons in 5o words or less. Some of the highlights for me were Piet (a language that looks like abstract art, and changes in colour affect the program flow) and Shakespeare -(a language where the code resembles a Shakespeare play – they showed a great video of how this would look which was well done). I also relived programming of languages from my past and present including COBOL, JCL, BASIC, Python Ant and Java.

A copy of the keynote delivered at JAOO in 2008 is available online if you would like to watch or relive it.

Agile Academy Meetup: A Business Value Focused Model for Story Identification

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MeetupAgile AcademyShane Hastie presented at the September 2010 Agile Academy Meetup in Brisbane on the topic of user stories. Here are my notes:

Agile Academy Meetup Shane Hastie

  • use models to break complex problems down to manageable chunks
  • Standish Group – number of canceled projects has increased with agile and number of wasted money projects have decreased – trend seems to be that agile is driving the cancellation of bad projects
  • business value is not delivered until it is in production and being used by the users
  • nobody ever does a business realisation review – 9 months after the project ask did we deliver what we said we would deliver
  • turn the story card around to emphasise value – so that… I want…
  • users is a bad term – implies they are addicted to something – they are customers of our service, victims of our software
  • think about who is your customer, what are their real needs – pin a picture up of them up on the wall to remind you to ask what they would think
  • events happen – business events (random but we need to be able to respond them when they arise), temporal events (happen due to the passage of time such as end of month, annual backup, daily backup, quarterly review) and conditional events (happen because something else happened)
  • suggest adding when to epics to track events as a… when… I want… when… so that
  • elementary business process – done by one person (or small team) in one place at one time – this is the level we should usually look for our epics
  • look for CRUD – a business process that is supposed to happen
  • latch onto nouns in customer conversations – a trigger that something is done
  • look at the management levels – we are good at the immediate needs of the workforce, but what about the needs of supervisory management, middle management and top management
  • think about the impact of data from external sources – what if the GST percentage changed tomorrow (it is in New Zealand!)
  • the model for epics – As a.. When… I Want… Using… So That
  • add the CRUD to the using statements to confirm the process
  • next level down look into Jeff Patton’s story mapping process
  • the smell of stories – PERFUM (Performance, Efficiency, Functionality, Usability, Maintainability) – in some cases if you don’t look after these, a refactor will mean rewrite the system
  • value is in the delivery of a complete epic
  • epic model helps you figure out how big the project is without going to a low level of detail
  • epic model is based on early work by Ed Yourdon and works on any project, including waterfall

Agile Australia 2010: Building an A-Team – I Love It When A Team Comes Together

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Agile Australia 2010My presentation from Agile Australia 2010 called “Building an A-Team – I Love It When A Team Comes Together” is available on SlideShare.

High performing teams are something that all organisations aspire to, but how exactly do you turn a team from good to great? There is much discussion in the community about management versus leadership, working in a factory versus embracing a tribe and how to motivate a new generation of employees. In this presentation we will look at these topics and determine what makes a high performing team, how Agile techniques can help, what tools and techniques you can use to create this environment and how you can measure performance.

Some of the comments on Twitter included:

@benarnott: Get back to the basics, remember why we are here, we are here to deliver quality software – @smithcdau #agileaus

@benarnott: #agileaus Some of the best company’s have thrown out performance reviews – @smithcdau Sign me up!

@benarnott:#agileaus @smithcdau is talking about Fedex days, Google days and Hackathons… I like to call them “Scratch an itch day”

@benarnott:#agileaus Leaders aren’t just PMs and Mangers, they are anyone with the skills and the passion like @renemaslen on BQI – @smithcdau

@benarnott:#agileaus I don’t want to be good, I want to be awesome! – @smithcdau

@benarnott:#agileaus in the overflowing room with @smithcdau talking the A-Team

@nickmuldoon: @smithcdau talking about the A team right now. Standing room only. #agileaus awesome!

@janevlahos: @smithdcau software development pays better than gardening #agileaus

ANZTB SIGIST Brisbane: Agile Testing & How We Need To Change

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ANZTBA couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to present at the ANZTB SIGIST Brisbane September meeting with my colleague Rene Maslen. Our talk was “Agile Testing and How We Need To Change” and the slides are available on Slideshare.

Some of my other colleagues also presented on the night including Ben Sullivan and Brent Acworth who spoke on BDD and some work they are doing on an open source framework for JBehave and Craig Aspinall who spoke on Automated Black Blob Testing.

Alister Scott had some nice words to say on my presentation on his blog and was also nice enough to take some pictures, which I have embedded below: