Contents

1. Upcoming courses
2. The rise of functional programming
3. Give your Code Some Love at J-Spring
4. New course: Agile Product Development
5. Few places available for Mini XP Day
6. QWAN supports Alpe d’HuZes
7. Events

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1. Upcoming courses
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6 May, Mastering Unit Testing
20-22 May, eXperience Agile
3-5 June, eXperience Agile
9 June, Mastering Unit Testing
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.

www.qwan.it

We have updated our brochure! We have added 4 new courses: Practical
Object Oriented Design, Pimp my Retrospective, Agile Product
Development, and Mastering Scrum. We have also included 3 new
workshops: Dirty Jobs, Give your Code Some Love, and Promise is Debt.
We welcome your feedback, as we’re continuously improving our
brochure.

www.qwan.it/doc/courses_and_workshops_2009.pdf

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2. The rise of functional programming
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Recently, we see a surge of interest in functional programming
languages. For instance, Microsoft has introduced F# and has recruited
some key people working on Haskell (a modern functional programming
language). Twitter is experimenting with Erlang (originally created by
Ericsson for use in telephone switches) and Scala (a functional
programming language running on the Java Virtual Machine), so they can
To process large numbers of messages.

Why this sudden interest? Functional programming has been around as
long as programming languages exist. LISP for instance is already more
than 40 years old. Until recently, functional programming was mostly
restricted to universities.

An important driving force behind the rising interest is that in the
near future, computers will only become faster by doing more things in
parallel (multi core). Functional programming languages are well
suited for writing programs that can be executed in parallel. Data
that can be modified simultaneously by multiple tasks makes parallel
programming difficult. Functional languages like Haskell and Scala
make it attractive and easy to do as much as possible with immutable
data. Sharing immutable data between parallel tasks is easy. Those
parts of the program that still need to modify shared state can be
isolated easily.

At the SPA 2009 conference in April, there were quite a few
presentations and workshops on Haskell:

www.tinyurl.com/djduws

Learning a new programming language is a good way to improve your
programming skills. You will learn new problem solving approaches that
you can also apply in your daily work. We expect to see more and more
Java and C# programs where code that modifies shared state is clearly
separated from code that doesn’t. Together with Mike Hill, Willem has
organized a Haskell coding dojo at the eXtreme Tuesday Club in London:

www.xpdeveloper.net/xpdwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Xtc20090428

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3. Give your Code Some Love at J-Spring
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Understandig is something that can easily be overseen as an important
value for delivering affordable code in a sustainable way. Research
and our own experience show that developers spend at least 75% of
their time on reading and understanding code. After the first line of
code has been written, the maintenance phase has started. Good
programmers modify existing code in small steps to understand it
better before they make functional changes, and refactor it after they
are done, so the code expresses what they’ve learned and will be
easier to modify safely the next time around.

That’s why we gave a demonstration at the J-Spring conference on April
15th, showing how you can give your code just a bit more love and
attention – love and attention is not found in big gestures, but in
small things. Just a bit of attention can make a huge difference.
Using three different open source projects, we showed how you can make
code more habitable with just 10 minutes of care.

Some questions from the audience:

- When do you start? We already start when we are reading code. We
rename for example variables, methods and classes and extract new
methods. In this way, the code improves while our understanding grows.

- When do you stop? This is subjective and depends on the context. We
apply the ‘campground rule’: leave code in a better shape than we
found it in. It is important that everyone in the team can understand
the code quickly and change it easily.

We also offer this session in-house, as a presentation or hands-on
workshop.

www.nljug.org/pages/events/content/jspring_2009/sessions/00007/

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4. New course: Agile Product Development
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Once their development teams have embraced agile development and know
how to deliver working software frequently, many organizations find
that the bottleneck is no longer within engineering. It shifts to the
realm of product management: how to do effective product development?
Scrum states that the Product Owner should create and maintain a
prioritized product backlog, eXtreme Programming requires the Customer
to speak with one voice. In practice, this is easier said than done.
The customer realm is a complex but essential part of the value
stream. Striving for excellence in engineering and project management
practices is not enough, mastering agile product development is also
necessary.

For this reason, we have developed a new two day course on Agile
Product Development, focusing on questions like:

- How do I prioritize by business value? What is business value
anyway?
- How do I write good user stories?
- How do I make sure a story is really done and stays that way?
- A simple linear, prioritized backlog does not work for me, what
alternative strategies are available?
- How do I manage many stakeholders with conflicting requirements?
- My customer wants it all, but I know she isn’t going to need every
bell and whistle. How do I manage her expectations?

We offer tools and techniques for release planning and management,
prioritizing, effective analysis, story writing, and story testing. We
will also cover strategies like Story Mapping, Kanban, and Dimensional
Planning which help you deliver business value to multiple
stakeholders in a sustainable way.

www.qwan.it/agile-product-development

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5. Few places available for Mini XP Day
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There are still some places available for the Mini XP Day conference,
which will take place on 11 May in Mechelen (Belgium). The program
offers nine of the most valued sessions of XP Days Benelux 2008. QWAN
will run the Dirty Jobs workshop and the redesigned Exectutable Story
Specifications with RSpec session.

www.xpday.net/Xpday2009/Mini%20XPDay/Program.html

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6. QWAN supports Alpe d’HuZes
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Alpe d’HuZes is an event where cyclists cycle to collect money for
the fight against cancer. Rob participates, sponsored by QWAN. He will
climb the legendary Alpe d’Huez at least six times in one day. An
almost impossible challenge. Nonetheless quite a few participants
managed to achieve this in 2006, 2007, and 2008, even a number of
(former) cancer patients. In 2008, a record amount of 3 million Euro
was collected! The goal for 2009 is to surpass this record amount.

At the moment, Rob is training hard to make the six times…

www.opgevenisgeenoptie.nl/over/visieuk.php

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7. Events
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11 May, Mini XP Day (Mechelen, Belgium) – www.xpday.net

25-30 May, XP 2009 (Sardinia, Italy) – www.xp2009.org
QWAN organizes sessions on technical debt, agile product
development, and a scrapheap challenge

6 June, Dutch Open Space Code Day (The Hague, NL) -
www.openspacecode.nl

18 June, Integrating Agile conference (Hoofddorp, NL) -
www.tinyurl.com/dcpemx

24-28 August, Agile 2009 (Chicago, USA), agile2009.agilealliance.org

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