Agile

Agile Academy Meetup: Usability & Clouds

/ Craig Smith / 3 Comments

MeetupAgile AcademyThe Agile Academy runs a quarterly meetup in Brisbane and held a meetup this week on usability, whilst their meetup in November was on Cloud Computing. Here is my wrapup:

Agile Is From Mars, Usability Is From Venus

  • lots of good agile usability discussion started by Jeff Patton on the agile-usability group
  • cobbled together design forces usability not to have the incremental design it needs
  • coding is creative, the only thing mechanical is compiling
  • be a tribe leader and collaborate, suggested reading is Tribes by Seth Godin. Teale recognised by her managers for her leadership for getting out there and posting to the internal Yammer site
  • goal directed design, focus on the goals of the user – design applications in terms of needs and goals and underlying motivations, so when the transport or technology changes, the design work is still relevant
  • poetpainter.com (Stephen Anderson, Interaction Designer) – who are we designing for and what are we designing for, fundamentals of experience design (http://www.poetpainter.com/thoughts/category/Models–Frameworks/)
  • get into the head of users with user needs – motivation keywords to articulate user needs – increase positive aspects, maintaining status quo and decrease negative aspects – flopped as a workshop but worked wonders as a survey (and surprised the business as to the candid responses from the users)
  • user goals – who I want to be (life goals), what I want to do (end goals) and how I want to feel (experience goals)
  • use success sliders to understand how important the project team view usability
  • personas – need to have understanding of users and need to do impact analysis
  • storyboards do not need to be neat, just a rough drawing to determine if you are hitting the mark
  • put the name of the persona in the storycard (not just the role) such as: As a [role of user] [name of persona]…
  • use MOSCOW (Must, Should, Could, Won’t) for prioritisation
  • 960 grid system – consistent framework for screen design
  • parallel track system – designers one iteration ahead of developers and business two iterations ahead of developers
  • the featuritis curve – more features you add, the harder it is use
  • 5 second usability test – realise that the middle part of the page is the most important part of the page, helps business understand where to put content – see http://fivesecondtest.com for example, but Teale creates her own with PowerPoint
  • for more on usability testing read the Handbook of Usability Testing or use TechSmith Morae (but this is very expensive)

From the question and answer session:

  • hard to manage parallel development two iterations ahead because stories always change, Marina Chiovetti added that research suggests this only works for a maximum one or two week sprints/iterations whilst Phil Abernathy suggested that the use of usability frames means that screens are being tested with the users upfront
  • Tealse does not use wireframing tools but rather does these in a workshop by hand. She only uses Adobe Photoshop when needed. Someone suggested that Adobe Fireworks is also a good tool and has templates on 960 Grid System
  • PAC analysis – People, Activities, Context

Agile, Lean & Green IT Come Together

Gavin Keeley presented at the Agile Academy November 2009 Meetup:

  • President Obama mentioned green as much as the global financial crisis in his innauguration speech
  • commerical use of IT is responsible for 2% of CO2  emissions, larger than the airline industry
  • of all PCs in use, only 6% of capacity is utilised
  • power is the biggest issue for data centre managers – can’t get enough off the grid
  • Suggested reading: Green To Gold by Esty & Winston
  • Amazon is the poster child for cloud computing, issues with latency in Australia thoughcloud – getting capacity just before you need it
  • agiles final frontier – how do we get colleagues in infrastructure on the journey with application developers
  • VMware at Virtualization Forum 2009 – View, vSphere, vCloud, vApps (what was Spring) – 85% market share
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V also on the bandwagon
  • Xen – open source virtualisation technology – Oracle only allowing certification on Xen
  • latest buzzword – the software mainframe – that’s restrictive, how about the software data centre
  • 3tera doing interesting things in the grid space

ASWEC 2009 Wrapup

/ Craig Smith / Leave a comment

ASWEC 2009Earlier last year I attended the Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC) on the Gold Coast. I recently had to dig up my notes when creating a summary of my year in Agile (2009), and, since the conference was before I started blogging in anger, I decided to post up my notes now.

My impressions of the conference was that whilst its theme was “Agile, the New Mainstream”, many of the core attendees (mainly from the academic and research environments) were relatively unaware of agile in practice. My core criticism was that unlike other conferences I have presented at, this conference requires the speakers to still pay to attend. Luckily my employer was a sponsor and negotiated a free pass, but for this reason I did not submit a proposal for the ASWEC 2010 conference that is being held in Auckland, New Zealand.

ASWEC 2009 - Agile Academy

The following are my notes from the sessions that I attended.

Keynote: Specialization and Economies Of Scale

Mary Poppendieck delivered the day 1 keynote:

  • deal with complexity? – divide and conquer – along what lines do we divide?
  • “The Pin Factory” (Adam Smith, 1776) – divide by specialisation
  • 1930, Ford – the ultimate pin factory – variety is the enemy – a car for every purpose
  • cost of changeover – batch and queue – $ cost to change machines over, Little’s Law (queuing theory)
  • cost of delay – cash flow, obsolecence
  • cost of mistakes
  • cost of motion
  • cost complexity – scheduling, learning
  • use a work cell instead of economies of scale – relied on cross functional team
  • 1968, Edsker Dijkstra defined structured programming and proclaimed need to eliminate bugs to start with, the programming will be cheaper
  • 1972, Harlan Mills defined top down programming – should not have difficulty at integration
  • divide by hierarchy / organisation
  • 1972, Dave Parnas defined criteria for decomposition – modular programming, easier to change
  • 1974, Vint Cerf / Robert Kahn invented TCP/IP – each network stands alone, no information retained by routers, no global control, communications on best effort basis
  • division by matching the domain

Amazon – all about scale

  • transitioned to services, each one
  • owned by two pizza team – must be able to feed the team with two pizzas
  • eliminated communication between teams, seven people cradle to grave, cross functional, stay a minimum of two years
  • now sell as cloud computing
  • like TCP/IP, don’t need to reach agreement – eventual compatibility, don’t worry about different databases, accept and deal with failure
  • software structure meets organisation structure
  • teams need independence to be creative
  • Conway’s Law
  • 1976, Barry Boehm – SDLC – specialisation (like Ford)
  • IBM – convert 35,000 engineers world-wide to agile
  • WebSphere – 10 month deadline, customer feedback every iteration, early access program, customer feedback on discussion forum – 50% of marketing information wrong so developers listened to customer – phenomenal sales day one of release, support calls down by an order of magnitude
  • case study – do agile right and find defects the minute they happen
  • xUnit testing – one of the best software engineering advances in the last decade
  • batch and queue so ingrained, we fail to see queues of work that will take years to clear
  • utilisation paradox – 100% utilisation of highway is a parking lot
  • Empire State Building – September 1929 to May 1931 – on time and 18% under budget, demolition to finish – biggest issue was supply of materials, the only thing that was scheduled (Carol Willis, “Building The Empire State” builders notebook)
  • 4 pacemakers to build the building
  • schedule the constraint – use a pacemaker schedule for the constraint

Towards Specification Based Testing for Semantic Web Services

Gill Dobbie delivered this presentation:

Intellectual Property In The Software Industry

I always enjoy presentations on the legal side of IT, and Alistair Smith delivered this informative presentation:

  • 4,000 patents last year to IBM, USA has the most number of patents
  • copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself
  • patents protect products, methods or processes – jurisdictional (so need to apply multiple times)
  • confidential know-how – not known to the public (eg. the recipe for Coca Cola)- work must be secret, can be leaked
  • trademarks – distinguish goods / services of a trader, Coca Cola 80% is recognition of product – must be distinctive, reproducible, people trading for smells (tyres that smell like roses), can be renewed indefinitely
  • strong protection – need range of IP types
  • do an R&D review eg. Kambrook and power boards
  • patent pending – filed but not yet granted
  • open source and patents do not mix – but use other IP
  • reward inventors
  • formalise IP ownership – make explicit in employment contracts
  • review existing IP – company that had patent for JPEG compression missed 10 years of royalties
  • maintain records of R&D – evidence of inventorship, ownership and prove date of creation for copyright purposes – maintain previous versions of software in unchangeable form, keep notes in bound notebook, dated and signed
  • search IP databases – look at what competitors are doing
  • use trademarks that are registerable – not descriptive  of product, should be distinctive
  • don’t just rely on copyright – does not protect against independent creation
  • don’t rely on confidentiality agreements alone – provides very little protection and hard to prove and hard to recover from
  • don’t rely on open source software being unencumbered by patents eg. Microsoft has 200 Linux patents, IBM “bluewash” on its new takeovers and check code line by line (takes six months)
  • no 10% rule on copying software – infringe is a substantial part – 2 JS/CSS files in a content management system
  • don’t forget to mark products – impact on damages

Invited Presentation: Bringing Agile To Life At The Enterprise Level

ASWEC 2009 - Jeff Smith

Jeff Smith, the CIO of Suncorp, delivered this keynote presentation:

  • feedback is essential
  • Wikipedia – 6 employess, 200,000 hours of contribution from community
  • Grateful Dead – high grossing band, found people like listening to music together, “collaboration”
  • leaders need to encourage simplicity
  • provide tools to enable collaboration
  • leaders use passion not threats to get things done
  • innovation / entrepreneurship is for everyone – need to channel the passion
  • Pixar – core beliefs, simplicity, intellectual capability
  • managers need to help teams get out of failure
  • trusted environment – safe to tell the truth, create a learning environment
  • creativity for everyone not just the artists, focus on people not the ideas
  • disseminate the authority to the teams
  • similarities between Pixar and agile
  • get people interested in learning
  • why? why now? why do it this way?
  • we are good at reacting, not so good at responding, initiate change is hard
  • generosity is hard – right for community before yourself
  • managers have employees, leaders have followers
  • culture top down, innovation bottom up
  • fear of failure – actually fear of blame / feedback, very few people fired due to a failed project
  • worse than “no” is a “not yet”

Can change behaviour but hard to change beliefs:

  • don’t believe what you tell them
  • don;t believe what you show them
  • believe what friends tell them
  • people always believe what they tell themselves
  • recognise leadership is scarce – is uncomfortable
  • few things happen by accident
  • don’t settle, have faith in what we do
  • inspire, connect, leverage…

Agile In Government: Successful On-Time Delivery of Software

Adrian Royce delivered this presentation (and the paper won the award for best industry paper):

  • agile buzzword – everybody wants to be flexible
  • chose Scrum – collaboration and for the whole team, encompasses agile principles
  • backlog, only tasks of highest immediate business value were actioned
  • pilot project successful (Housing)
  • twelve successful projects delivered using Scrum (6 = pilot, 3 < pilot, 3 > pilot)
  • largest Scrum project undertaken ($3 million, 4 months ahead of schedule)
  • not everyone ready for Scrum, “just common sense”
  • sense that agile projects increase risk
  • agile = no documentation – government audits require documentation
  • obstacle – organisation and culture
  • benefits – hard to quantify, able to respond quickly
  • increase in morale, productivity, adaptability and business engagement, low staff turnover
  • Scrum Master is essential, focus on team, remove impediments, sprint zero is a necessity
  • do not impose, keep productive teams together, human interaction over technology
  • measure everything, focus on quality (client was not going to be the first to find a bug), leadership essential

Implementing an Enterprise System at Suncorp Using Agile Development

ASWEC 2009 - James Couzens

James Couzens delivered this presentation:

  • what worked well – business engagement, wide stakeholder group
  • not working well – coordination with integration team, managing backlog, overly focussed on showcase
  • definition of done not appearance of done
  • textbook agile does not scale without adjustments
  • business need to be onboard

Keynote: Agile Thinking – From Concept to Reality

Graeme Wood, the founder of Wotif, delivered this keynote:

  • started using agile without knowing they were using it
  • design constrained by six UI screens and a rough database design
  • chaos is fun, makes people think quickly
  • market for hotel rooms not working efficiently (travel agents) – only 60% – 70% occupancy
  • no business plan, no design, originally written by two people sitting side by side, allowed for quick change
  • launched in 2000 with 60 hotels, slim margin
  • no advertising budget, word of mouth, wined and dined journalists, wrote stories, etc
  • simplistic UI – has hardly changed
  • supplier can change cost hour by hour – not locked in
  • fewest number of clicks, no login / registration
  • keen not to have hospitality people – that was model we were trying to change
  • small teams, 9-10 max – largest system made them focus on the architecture – if don’t have that becomes “wild west territory”
  • flat organisational structure, keep small teams focussed on what they are there for
  • business dragged back from solving all of the “distressed inventory” opportunities
  • need to get agile thinking into the business planning area  why don’t more IT people go towards management? – IT such a big part
  • start your own conversation, send a demo to influence, start a future systems blog
  • communication with potential business partners or customers
  • social networking has opened up communication outside normal business
  • all this fails, resign and start your own business
  • majors came aboad reluctantly, no paid positions, alphabetical is star rating, started renaming properties and getting regraded – leveled the playing field
  • suppliers to hospitality industry have been slow to change
  • started with Visual Basic, now all open source
  • Wotnews – public site plus corporate solution to look for customers, staff, etc… Initially around financial services, feeds from the ASX, verging on Media Monitors, greater depth than Google News, can get Wotnews to get competitors newsletters
  • re-architected about two years in, cancelled big bag because it didn’t feel right,now doing incrementally

Static Bug Checking Tools and Why You Should Care

Nathan Keynes delivered this presentation:

  • date back to Lint (1978)
  • FindBugs
  • most people just run once
  • most bug checkers report false positives and false negatives
  • commercial bug checkers expensive, comparisons not available and price on size of codebase
  • upfront effort, legacy codebase may not be parseable
  • Parfait for C++ / C – Sun for Solaris
  • BegBunch – benchmarking bug checking tools – accuracy / performance

Simulating Software Evolution with Varying Numbers of Developers and Validation Using OSS

Steve Counsell delivered this presentation:

  • hard to known optimum number of developers – Brook’s Law
  • used software to simulate this
  • empirical studies difficult – costly, OSS disparate, developers
  • comprehension not so good, implementation very little variation

Project Management Stage

ASWEC 2009 - Project Management Stage

I was thrilled to be invited to chair the Project Management Stage on behalf of the Agile Academy, and introduce two awesome talks by Paul Bannerman (Risk Implications of Software Project Organization Structures) and Steve Jenkins (Failing at Iteration Management – Analyst Style)

ASWEC 2009 - Craig Smith Project Management Stage

ASWEC 2009 - Steve Jenkins

Extreme Programming Stage

Myself and a number of my colleagues were together on this stage including:

Andy Marks presenting Faking Agility – A Coach’s Observations

ASWEC 2009 - Andy Marks

Rebecca Hopkins presenting Infrastructure Projects Go Agile!

ASWEC 2009 - Rebecca Hopkins

And myself and Paul King presenting Experiences from Agile Projects Great & Small

ASWEC 2009 - Craig Smith &amp; Paul King

and the copy of our presentation:

JIRA 4 Partner Hosted Seminar

/ Craig Smith / Leave a comment

In November, Steve Dalton and I hosted a partner seminar for the launch of JIRA 4.0. Steve’s company Refactor is an Atlassian partner and I attended on behalf of the Agile Academy who sponsored the room at Brisbane Square. Atlassian provided a JIRA t-shirt for all of the attendees.

Steve kicked off with an overview of JIRA and a demo of the the new Open Social dashboard as well as the new JQL functionality.

I then gave a demo of JIRA and GreenHopper 4.0, and its usage at Suncorp. Some of the topics I covered included:

  • overview of other new Jira functionality, such as activity streams, the new menu system and the ability to create a new issue on the right hand side of the Find Issues screen
  • GreenHopper is a plugin
  • remember the difference between radiators and refridgerators when evaluating tools
  • Suncorp chose JIRA due to cost and already in use
  • housekeeping – GreenHopper administration (global and local), custom fields (story points, epics), performance
  • planning board – versions and components, new epic functionality, synchronisation, release, drag and drop functionality, statistics, print cards, user preferences and contexts, new card button, new wiki rendering
  • task board – setup, workflows, new Kanban functionality, storypoints, double click cards, subtasks
  • chart board / release board – reliance on statistics and GreenHopper functionality
  • cross project burn down and the new agile gadget

There is no video of the event, although I feel the JIRA 4 webinar covers much of the functionality we discussed quite nicely.

OSDC 2009: Experiences From Agile Projects Great & Small

/ Craig Smith / 1 Comment

My presentation from the OSDC 2009 Conference in Brisbane that I presented with Paul King called “Experiences From Agile Projects Great & Small” is available on SlideShare.

Experiences From Agile Projects Great & Small

Facilitating a Successful Developer Day

/ Craig Smith / 3 Comments

When an executive manager approached me a few weeks ago with the idea of running a developer day with one of his Java development teams, I jumped at the opportunity. The idea was simple: emulate the success of Google 20% time and the Atlassian Fedex day to improve the collaboration and skills of a bunch of developers.

Research

I started out with some research and found the following excellent resources:

The Running Sheet

It was decided (in hindsight, a fantastic decision) to hold the day in a neutral venue away from the usual office in a training room environment. The pre-requisites equipment-wise were at least one machine per two attendees (we ended up with two high-spec developer machines and a bunch of laptops), network access, a projector and the usual agile materials of post-it notes and pens. A supply of snacks and drinks was also available to give it a “start-up” feel.

As we had two days and wanted to also allow for some presentations and discussions, the run of the days ended up as follows:

Day 1

9.00am: Standup Introductions (All), why are we here, team building exercise (paper folding exercise)

Give each member of the group an A4 piece of paper, the facilitator needs one too. Have them close their eyes. The facilitator issues the instructions and follows them as well. No questions are allowed.

  1. Fold the paper in half.
  2. Rip offf a corner
  3. Fold the paper in half
  4. Rip off a corner
  5. Fold the paper in half
  6. Rip off a corner

The group can now open their eyes and find that there are many different shapes of paper. The debrief covers the need for two way communication and that the different perceptions of the people caused the many different designs. If time permits the group can be put in pairs. Have the pairs sit back to back and repeat the exercise using two way communications and find that the patterns come out closer

10.00am: Presentation (Agile Tools & Maturity)

11.00am: Brainstorm / Retrospective: What would make this a better team -> how can we make a difference in 24 (8) hours

The idea was to review the good and not so good of the team and help determine the issues the team would like to tackle.

12.30pm: Iteration 0 / Planning / Lunch

Melbourne GI Developer Day Rules

2.00pm: Iteration 1

Including a quick planning session

3.30pm: Iteration 2

Including a quick retrospective and planning session

Day 2

9.00am: Standup

Overview of highlight of yesterday and what planned to do today.

9.30am: Iteration 3

Including a quick retrospective and planning session

10.30am Iteration 4

Including a quick retrospective and planning session

12.30pm: Developer Practices discussion / lunch

Based on the development practices prescribed on the Donkey open source project.

1.30pm: Iteration 5

Including a quick retrospective and planning session to ensure ready for the 3pm demo

3.00pm: Demo Showcase

Melbourne GI Developer Day Demo

4.00pm: Closing Statements and circle

The Outcome

Well, it turned out better than I could have imagined! Iteration 0 everybody turned a bunch of PC’s in boxes and chairs and tables into 5 distinct teams. Story walls went up, planning started and the software required was downloaded (or people remotely accessed their work machines). Pair programming naturally happened (the limited number of machines helped this) and teams supported other teams when they ran into problems or needed assistance.

Melbourne GI Developer Day

The 5 teams focussed either on stuff they wanted to learn or things they wanted to achieve to help their everyday work. The projects attempted roughly consisted of:

  • a mobile web application using the Play framework
  • investigation into using JMX for application monitoring
  • automating WebSphere environment creation with JACL / Jython scripts
  • scripting legacy mainframe account creation for testing purposes
  • performance testing using JMeter and The Grinder

The morale was high at the end of the two days, everybody clearly learnt something and the developers were asking when the next event was. Success!

Dave Thomas on Maximum Software Productivity – Breaking The Rules!

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Dave Thomas paid a visit to Brisbane to present his talk Maximum Software Productivity – Breaking The Rules! at the Microsoft office at Waterfront Place. He set the scene by suggesting the last time he gave this talk he was innundated with hate mail from agilista and objectas! Dave promised the slides would be posted, but I have not been able to locate them if they have. Here are my notes from the session:

  • tired of need to get agile and need to get objects – both good, but got nothing from it, where is the value?
  • objects good, agile good, but are we any better off?
  • most software late, bloated, poor to maintain
  • business does not define requirements well, don’t engage or talk to the customers (NEHITO visits – “Nothing Ever Happens In The Office”), insist on the industry norms because that is what everybody else is using
  • storypoints – training wheels for people who don’t know how to estimate
  • IT does not estimate well, do not build continuously or automatically test (need to be prepared to write a big cheque), also fixed in technology
  • if not ready to do TDD, just stop! Scrum will only make you feel good
  • need to change the rules to be competitive
  • living in legacy due to OO mud ball – legacy is code where there is no tests (see Brian Foote – Big Ball Of Mud)
  • objects too hard for normal people, first thing to be voted off the island should be Hibernate, objects don’t work for lots of things (queries, rules, transformations, etc…)
  • 80% of objects are CRUD – no objects except for the junk in the middle – just data, no simulations or data model – taking a solution and making it complicated and slowing it down
  • frameworks – so many to choose from, new versions, latest things, lots of dependencies
  • dependency injection is proof of how much we have screwed up objects
  • object libraries are unstable and languages are complex (attributes, generics, concurrency)
  • very few people use interfaces properly and keep them stable release to release
  • little reuse – promise not a reality
  • serialization carries all of the baggage of the objects contained within
  • objects suck up performance and memory – bulky and computationally expensive
  • objects cumbersome and slow for multi-core processors to run efficiently
  • objects are sequential and parallel
  • Java application will be 4 to 5 times slower than PHP, because objects are slower
  • can we shorten software value chain – shorter, faster, cheaper – Facebook built in PHP but the money rolls in
  • agile shows predictability and productivity but zip about quality
  • agility is good, but in Java it is very difficult to change the code quickly
  • scrum increases morale (everybody feels better), but makes no difference to quality unless doing TDD
  • lean thinking – software waste – if not prepared to spend $2 million to do continuous integration and TDD then they are not serious about their software output and quality
  • don’t go to meetings unless it is increasing the bottom line – will it help ship code?
  • how to make zero defect code? Don’t ship anything!
  • lean – simple – why am I doing this? – do we need a new framework? – NO!
  • staff a team with people who have shipped software (have a track record)
  • fix price your consultants and enforce that they make delivery with acceptance tests – pay when they pass
  • reward people on delivery, not how long they work
  • tangible requirements – story on the front, acceptance criteria on the back, start with acceptance tests, they are more valuable
  • envisioning – what the developer sees is not what the customer wants
  • agile great for prototyping – building small requirements on the fly
  • a backlog filled with lumpy requirements will burn out designers and product owners – original Scrum paper said sprint 0 should be 3 months – envisioning
  • architects – not a job, a role – should be able to code
  • some companies pay senior developers same as VP
  • extreme design – four hours to design software and hardware and cost it – after a few, you can get close and find out quickly what you don’t understand
  • serious engineering needs design
  • API first – design the architecture, should always be able to get architecture from the code (push a button)
  • need API’s versioned in the code
  • want to close gap between needs and solution
  • a picture is 1,000 words, a table 200 and a diagram 50
  • table driven programming – easily understood, easy to refactor, easy to consistency check (look for missing data), easy to version and diff (just data), data driven can be changed live in a running instance
  • integration – talk to old systems use RSS/ATOM feed (almost all old systems will give a feed for each transation) then you can talk it without custom api’s, REST/JSON your services or use ODBC as a simple interface (its not just for databases), use mashup tools to deliver an integrated application view
  • use scripts to save time & dollars – most software gets thrown way even before turned on, C# and Java too heavyweight, Ruby, Python, PHP, Groovy, Clojure, can easily leverage cloud services and existing services
  • productive languages – LINQ and Reactive LINQ (Haskell underneath), Erlang (good for swicthing and moving traffic, highly efficient), F#, Ruby, Scala (a better Java), Kleisli (bioinformatics), Clojure
  • Everybody should read “The Wizard Book”, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman
  • hardware is cheap, cloud is cheaper – all interesting data is in memory, databases are just journals and don’t really exist, Google does everything by brute force search (eg. translation), speed now means complicated stuff can be done easier and cheaper
  • data driven – massive storage means we can store it all very cheaply, run smart algorithms to determine best value customers because we have all of the data, recommendation engines (NetFlix), Net Promoter, complex event processing (open intelligence), real time financials (no end of month financials, know state of company all of the time)
  • query oriented programming (QOP), Greenplum, Q, Aleri (basically extended SQL dialects with functions) and other functional languages
  • array VM’s – better than object VM’s – always boxed, simpler garbage collection, support all data types (array of stuff is an array of stuff), VM can be small (just an interpreter), arrays are column stores already and trivially serialised, take less space and programs concise and compact
  • best practices for functional programming – agile , refactoring tools, FindBugs / Lint
  • challenges for functional programming – get out of math phobia, different way of thinking, need to write literate and understandable code, think in functions
  • yesterday and tomorrow is always wrong – if you get more bang for buck and competitive advantage, why use existing technologies, if you believe IT is strategic you need to do something strategic with it and dare to be different
  • lost of old things work, lots of new things work well, get out of agile and OO box

Barcamp Brisbane IV Wrapup

/ Craig Smith / 3 Comments

Barcamp BrisbaneLast weekend I got along to Barcamp Brisbane IV (held at the East Brisbane Bowls Club), and once again it was a worthwhile meetup of locals willing to share their skills with others.

From the lightning talks that I attended:

Speed Networking

One minute to introduce yourself to someone you don’t know. Worked well, although I knew more people this time around (after last BarCamp and other meetups).

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Michael Smale led this discussion on SEO (unfortunately it started a little late and lost a bunch of attendees, including myself, at the end due to a Google Wave presentation following it!). My notes from the session:

  • SEO is optimising for Google (& Yahoo!)
  • 9 out of 10 people search for content, very few click the sponsored search
  • keywords – on page (to help Google index) and off page
  • stem analysis – trunk and branches (eg. golf and balls, clubs, shoes) then leaves (buy golf shoes and Brisbane) – before SEO, find out what target audience is looking for
  • tools to analyse keywords – Google Adwords Keyword Tool (slightly out of date, monthly), worldwide but narrowed down to regions
  • to know backlinks, etc – Traffic Travis, Market Samurai (free and paid version)
  • not your trunk and branches, but for your leaves you may want to buy keywords, you can optimise different landing pages (separate URL but not a duplicate of pages as Google will drop prioritisation)
  • car rental very competitive for SEO
  • Google Trends for search – can see if things are trending up and down or compare
  • on page optimisation – Firebug for Firefox – drill down and inspect code, JavaScript debugger
  • YSlow – tell you how page is loaded and report on how to optimise page loading
  • each page needs to be optimised with its own title – what’s in the title is what the link on Google says
  • meta description after link is the blurb on Google – not visible to users on site, Firebug will help you see competitors meta tags are, but will not get you up in the ranking
  • meta keywords – does not mean anything anymore
  • care about content on site using LSI (Latent Semantic Index)
  • link text important, add href no follow so Google will ignore

Google Wave

Paul O’Keeffe and Steve Dalton led a live demonstration of Google Wave.

  • collaborative tool, still in preview, crashes, interface still weak
  • proliferated from developers in Google sandpit, only give 8 invites to each user
  • a wave is a single collaboration / conversation
  • has Gmail feel, add and save searches, folders, etc…
  • have a wave inbox
  • with:public – see any waves that are public
  • search with:public gardening
  • new wave by default is not public, add public@a.gwave.com
  • to start, drag contact in, give wave a name
  • drag and drop seems to depend on Google Gears, works out of box with Chrome
  • bots and plugins eg. pirate speak or add a Google Map / Twitter in
  • open source version of Chrome – Chromium
  • Sweepy bot – remove the empty conversations
  • can mute conversation and replay, has version control so you can see how it was and then fork it off

Business Structures

Malcolm Burrows from Rostron Caryle gave this presentation. I hope the slides are made available, as this was a large topic for a 20 minute slot. These are my notes but should not be relied upon an advice or for accuracy!

  • sole trader – liable for own debts, etc, house on the line, no protection freom risks, okay if you have little risk
  • partnership – not sure why anybody would do this now, agreement and governed by those terms, in Queensland partners are liable for acts of the other, everything has to be tailored, risks
  • company structure Pty Ltd – level of risk reduction such as corporate veil, shareholders only liable for the capital put in as long as you don’t do stupid stuff like trading insolvent, as directors do not profit from position of power, need to disclose, 12/20 rule can’t make more than 20 offers in 12 month period, no more than 50 shareholders, replaceable rules (eg. regulate by ASIC or regulate yourself in your constitution)
  • company structures – Limited – Public – all of baggage of public company without the good stuff, horrible!
  • trust – discretionary and unit
  • joint ventures – used a lot in mining, in IT where people agree to do stuff, like a trust is a feature of contract, rights of joint ventures can get very long
  • income distribution structure and IP protection structures
  • options for IP – spin out trading company, spin out company owned by trusts, spin out company licences another

Smile! Say Cheese!

DJ Paine from Studio Promise dropped by, and offered attendees a free portrait, which I certainly took advantage of. Just wished I had of known, and I would have had a shave and worn a nicer shirt!

All of the shots from the day are here and if you need professional photography, support those that support BarCamp!

Symphony – Open Source Content Management

Allen Chang and Alisair Kearney led this session on Symphony:

  • originally called TypeWorks
  • 2.0.6 out now, 2.1 on the way
  • uses XML as data format, output format standards compliant
  • Drupal and Joomla! cores are huge, they wanted a small footprint and control over data structure
  • use XSLT to transform XML to any format you like (eg. HTML, CSV, JSON, etc..)
  • native intergration REST API for Twitter, RSS, etc…)
  • uses open standard templating language, as per all CMS systems
  • a number of data sources for which you can apply rules
  • around 8,000 members, 10% of these contribute
  • users include Australian Museum of Democracy, Heineken and City of Westminster (London) amongst many others
  • ensemble – fully functional website package, Symphony itself is an ensemble

Agile Overview – The Three T’s

It occurred to me in the speed networking session that a number of attendees did not know what this agile hype was about, so I decided to on short notice to propose the talk I gave at Agile Australia 2009 to try and give that overview. Not sure if I succeeded, but got some questions afterwards nonetheless.

Had to laugh at one of the tweets from @funkygorilla (Simon Griffiths): “Agile web development in a 10 min presentation. That’s agile!”

Overview of Agile 2009 / Agile Australia 2009 / AAFTT Workshop

A couple of people decided they wanted to chat about some of the learnings and trends from the conferences I had recently, so a couple of us sat around and chatted about agile testing mainly.

New Hotness

Greg Luck led this discussion as he mentioned to me he came to Barcamp to hear about the new hotness. He has written the notes, but here were the notes I was taking at the discussion:

Wrapup

Paul and Steve reminded everybody about the Queensland Legion of Tech and Greg Luck announced the inaugural Brisbane Jelly (adhoc working together at a location)