Contents
1. Upcoming courses
2. Objects, roles, and responsibilities with TDD and mock objects
3. Agile Open Belgium
4. Give your code some love
5. Technical debt and product development at XP2009
6. Mini XP Day
7. XP Day Benelux is looking for sessions
8. Events
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1. Upcoming courses
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27-29 April, eXperience Agile
6 May, Unit Testing Masterclass
20-22 May, eXperience Agile
3-5 June, eXperience Agile
9 June, Unit Testing Masterclass
1-3 July, eXperience Agile
Courses will take place in Tilburg (The Netherlands), unless indicated
otherwise. We also deliver our workshops and courses at other
locations (depending on where most participants come from) and in-
house.
Brochure: www.qwan.it/doc/courses_and_workshops_2008_en.pdf
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2. Objects, roles, and responsibilities with TDD and mock objects
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Nowadays most developers work in Object Oriented languages, but we
noticed few know the principles and practices for ‘good’ OO design:
for instance Bob Martin’s SOLID principles, responsibility driven
design, and Class Responsibility Collaboration cards. Therefore we
have been developing new material to teach these principles and
practices, with a focus on roles, responsibilities, and interactions
between objects.
We have presented a tutorial on OO design with roles,
responsibilities, and mock objects at the Software Craftsmanship
conference on February 26th in London. We found out that many
developers know and use mock objects, but not as an enabler for
Responsibility Driven Design. The room was packed with experienced
developers. Amongst them was Steve Freeman, one of the inventors of
mock objects. He wrote down his observations:
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3. Agile Open Belgium
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“What strikes me when I listen to all these talks in the lobby, is the
passion people bring with it.” That’s what the cook said during the
second day of Agile Open Belgium in Ghent. Following other Agile Open
conferences, Agile Open Belgium was organized on 20 and 21 February,
according to Open Space principles:
* Whoever comes is the right people
* Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
* Whenever it starts is the right time
* When it’s over, it’s over
The program was co-created on the spot by the participants, who got
the most from it in this way. Some of the topics: co-learning spaces,
agile maturity, exploring contract models, kanban, Scrum without a
product backlog, remote pair programming, Scrum + support team, agile
waterfall, reducing waste and optimizing lead time in analysis,
language is futile (or is it?), manufacturability, can architecture
be agile?, and playing politics.
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4. Give your code some love
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Program code goes in maintenance mode after the first line has been
written. Everything that is done after that first line is a change to
existing code. Badly written code is normally not written by bad
programmers, but by good programmers doing their best. They design an
elegant solution for a design problem, but once the first solution is
out there, the code doesn’t get enough attention when it is modified,
so the code degrades over time.
At the J-Spring conference on April 15th, we will lead software
developers through a number of code fragments that seem allright at
first sight, but that can still be improved in our opinion – they just
need a little love. Like in the real world, love and attention is not
found in big gestures, but in small things. Just a bit of attention
can make a huge difference. Those things are often smaller than most
developers expect.
www.nljug.org/pages/events/content/jspring_2009/sessions/00007
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5. Technical debt and product development at XP2009
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Two of our sessions have been accepted for the program of the XP2009
conference:
* Promise is Debt – System Dynamics of Technical Debt – using systems
thinking techniques, we will provide insight how technical debt comes
into life, what keeps it in place, and how you can fix the root
causes. After this tutorial, you have a technique to solve hard
problems like technical debt in your workplace.
* Scrapheap Challenge. Use the internet as your scrapheap! Battle with
other developers! Use scrapped parts to beat other pairs, by
developing solutions to real problems in an ultra-short timeframe.
Willem organizes this with Lasse Koskela.
* The New New NEW! Product Development Game – an experiential workshop
where we will explore different approaches to agile product
development through simulation and exercises. We will apply e.g. story
mapping, dimensional planning, and kanban, and we will investigate the
effects on managing, planning, prioritizing, and learning.
This year, the conference offers an interesting mix of tutorials,
workshops, and open space facilitated by Willem together with Lasse
Koskela.
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6. Mini XP Day
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Couldn’t go to XP Days 2008? Missed a session? Want to send a
colleague to a great XP Days 2008 session? Mini XP Day 2009, taking
place at 11 May, brings back eight of the most valued sessions of last
year. We will run the redesigned ‘exectutable story specficications
with RSpec’ tutorial and Rob will be hosting Dirty Jobs with Tjakko
Kleinhuis.
www.xpday.net/Xpday2009/Mini%20XPDay/Program.html
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7. XP Day Benelux is looking for sessions
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Like previous years, the XP Day Benelux conference will be held in
November, this time in Belgium.
The best way to learn from a conference is to host a session. All
session submitters and organisers work together in an open and
collaborative session improvement process. This ensures that we get
the best possible sessions both from experienced and new presenters.
The deadline for submissions is August 1st, 2009.
www.xpday.net/Xpday2009/CallForSessions.html
New: is there a subject you would like to see at XP Days but you think
you can’t run a session about it? Is there a subject that isn’t
covered in XP Days sessions but that could benefit the participants?
Then you can send in a session request. We’ll publish all requests and
match up requesters with session creators. Maybe you will get to go to
the session you’ve always wanted to attend!
www.xpday.net/Xpday2009/RequestForSession.html
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8. Events
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31 March, Agile Holland meetup (Rotterdam, NL) with Jurgen Appelo, “So
Now You’re an Agilist… What’s Next?” – www.agileholland.com
5-8 April, SPA 2009 (London, UK) – www.spa2009.org – we will host two
workshops, “Sea Stories and Fairy Tales”, about automated functional
testing. and “Consulting without Secrets”, about marketing and sales
of coaching, consultancy, and other creative services.
15 April, J-Spring 2009 (Bussum, NL), the biannual conference of the
Dutch Java Users Group – www.nljug.org/jspring
11 May, Mini XP Day (Mechelen, Belgium) – www.xpday.net
25-30 May, XP 2009 (Sardinia, Italy) – www.xp2009.org
6 June, Dutch Open Space Code Day (The Hague, NL) -
www.openspacecode.nl
18 June, Integrating Agile conference (Hoofddorp, NL) -
www.tinyurl.com/dcpemx
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