"The Fall and Rise of Dynamic Languages"

Who: Rick DeNatale, Near Time, Inc.

When: November 25, 2008

A war is being waged between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance. The imperial forces are laboring tirelessly to stamp out such dangerous ideas as late-binding, and automatic memory management.

Based on long experience, such ideas are known to cause severe performance problems at best, and to bring down the Empire with errors at worst.

The year, 2008 Ruby vs. Java, or ca 1990 Smalltalk vs. C++, or …

The languages change, but the arguments remain. After a period in the shadows, dynamic languages have been on the rise again. Ruby has been at the forefront of this resurgence, with older dynamic languages tagging along. At the same time, hard-learned lessons from the implementation of these earlier languages are starting to have an influence on implementation of the newer ones. Witness the buzz in the Ruby community about “repurposing” projects such as MagLev.

This talk will explore the history of the dynamic vs. static debate, and attempt to bring to light the reasons why many of the arguments against dynamic languages are based on things which just don’t matter if the language isn’t static.

Rick will also have a few things to say about why things like MagLev make sense.

Speaker Bio

I am a long-time object oriented technologies, practitioner, evangelist, and provocateur.

During a 32 year career at IBM, I served in various capacities, including the development of the initial proof of concept for IBM VisualAge/Smalltalk, a distributed implementation of the Smalltalk language, parts of VisualAge Micro Edition for Java (the precursor to Eclipse), founding member of the X3J20 Smalltalk committee, and many other activities related to Smalltalk and Java, and in the early decades of OOPSLA.

This gave me the opportunity to know, work, and interact with many of those, some known, and others not so well known, who laid the groundwork for what we do with Ruby and how we do it.

I’ve been a Ruby programmer and consultang since shortly after ‘retiring’ in 2006. Currently I am working at Near-Time, a software-as-a-service business based on Rails.

My sporadic thoughts, mostly about the Ruby language and related topics can be found at my blog.

"Ruby on Rails Testing"

Who: Mike Swieton, Atomic Object

When: Tuesday, September 23, 2008

One of the tenets of Agile methodologies is effective testing. To give a project effective coverage over its whole lifetime, the tests must be automated. Atomic Object has recently completed its seventh year in business and during those seven years of projects we’ve developed some opinions about how to effectively test software.

In this talk we’ll look at some of these specific strategies for testing at both the unit test level and at the whole-system test level. These strategies can be applied effectively to all projects from Web software all the way to embedded code. We’ll look at some specific tools which are useful for testing the popular Ruby on Rails web application platform.

This talk is the same one Mike’s giving at the Windy City Rails conference in Chicago.

Speaker Bio

Mike’s been writing software for more than ten years. Throughout his high school and university years he spent a lot of time working on personal and open source projects just for the adventure of trying something new. Mike started with Atomic in 2003. His experience ranges from writing low-level concurrent programming and performance-critical code in C and C++ all the way up to very high level development in dynamic languages like Python, Perl, and Ruby. He’s created software for businesses as diverse as health care, distribution, and automotive manufacturing.

Group Therapy

XPwm Community

When: May 27, 2008

Bring your challenging problems and we’ll harness the power of our community in small groups to help solve them.

Experienced agile developers, project managers, and designers will be on hand to facilitate small group discussions around specific questions, issues and challenges.

Participation and topics will be self-organizing, ala Open Space.

We’ll have a Mexican fiesta from El Burrito Loco and Corona and pop to drink.

"Pulling Your Head Out of Your Budget: Mental Re-tooling for Agile Project Management"

Who: David Christiansen

When: April 22, 2008

Kennedy Hall is building 7 on this map.

Introducing agile project management techniques into a large, historically waterfall organization is not easy. It is not enough to simply change the prevailing practices related to IT project management. In most cases, it involves changing the way project managers, project teams, and executives see the world. It requires a change in values and behaviors that goes beyond daily standups and product backlogs.

David Christiansen started introducing agile project management in his projects in early 2006. He has implemented three major software projects using an agile approach in a waterfall world. As a certified PMP, David found that in order to successfully adopt the agile principles, he had to first change many of the notions and beliefs that his PMI training had instilled in him. This presentation walks through many of the changes David had to make to be a successful agile project manager, some of the painful, and some of them amusing. Every agile practitioner can find valuable lessons in David’s experience that help them more successfully adopt agile project management in their organizations.

For the second half of the meeting, David will show how he uses Microsoft Sharepoint to manage projects.

Speaker Bio

David is a project manager at a Fortune 100 insurance company, where he has spent the last two years introducing agile project management techniques to his very waterfall-centric organization. He is also the managing editor of Sapient Testing, the official newsletter of the Association for Software Testing (www.sapienttesting.com), and the founding editor of Technology Dark Side: A Corporate IT Survival Guide (www.techdarkside.com). He is a hobbyist writer, speaker, and trainer. One of his recent projects was to create a two-day practical workshop on exploratory testing with Mike Kelly.

"Agile Software Development and UI Design: a Match made in Heaven?"

Who: Robert Biddle, Carleton University

When: March 25, 2008

For much software today, the UI is a critical factor for success. The user interface and the interaction that it enables have a major impact in the effectiveness of software in actual use. While agile development addresses issues on the technical and business aspects of software development, little has been said about the UI. In fact, principle and practices in UI development have much in common with agile principles and practices. They are both driven by external needs, they both have a strong and early commitment to testing, and they are both iterative in their approach. There are some differences: agile development has a focus on the customer, while UI development has a focus on the user. And where they share terminology, it is not clear they mean the same thing: for example, both use the word “design”, but take very different perspectives. The key question is how these similar processes should work together. To address this question, our research group has studied many software teams around the world doing both agile software and UI development. In this talk, I will present our findings about current practice, and identify opportunities for better collaboration in the future.

Speaker Bio

Robert Biddle is a Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada: he is on graduate faculties of both Computer Science and Psychology. His research and teaching is in human-computer interaction and software engineering, involving active projects on agile development, computer security, and collaborative hypermedia. He earlier worked as a software developer and as a technical consultant. He is widely recognized as an outstanding researcher, educator, and presenter.

"From Eclipse to Jazz"

Who: Paul Vanderlei, IBM

When: January 29, 2008

Imagine you are part of global team of developers with offices in multiple countries spanning several time zones. Or you are part of a small, local team divided by differing work schedules or department affiliations. In either case, you collaborate with analysts, architects, developers, testers and other subject matter experts separated by time, distance or organization. What type of infrastructure would help you do your best work, both individually and as a team? The Jazz technology platform is designed to answer these needs.

Jazz is an IBM Rational project to build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for integrating work across the phases of the development lifecycle. We believe Jazz will help teams build software more effectively while making the software development activity more productive and enjoyable.

Paul VanderLei will give a presentation entitled “From Eclipse to Jazz” followed by a demo of Rational Team Concert, the first commercial product built on the Jazz platform.

Speaker Bio

Paul VanderLei lives in Grand Rapids and works for IBM. He is currently the Jazz Jumpstart team lead. Jazz Jumpstart is a globally distributed team tasked with enabling early adopters of Rational Team Concert and Jazz. Paul came to work for IBM as part of IBM’s acquisition of Object Technology International in 1996. Most notably, OTI and its remnant within IBM developed IBM’s J9 Java virtual machine, Eclipse and now Jazz. Paul holds degrees in Computer Science from Calvin College and Arizona State University.

"Interaction-Based Testing: Beyond Classical Unit Testing"

Who: Scott Miller, Atomic Object

When: November 27, 2007

This talk is a shortened version of a tutorial that Scott did this year at Dr. Dobb’s Architecture & Design World in Chicago.

This tutorial is focused on the practical use and application of interaction-based unit testing using dynamically generated mock objects. Attendees will follow along with the presenter in pairs on their laptops through the instruction and examples of interaction-based test driven development. While the principals and standards that will be covered in this tutorial apply to many development environments, the examples and projects will be done in either Java or C#. The tutorial will be divided into three parts. Part one will briefly review the methods and purposes of state-based unit tests. Examples will illustrate classical state-based TDD. Part two will introduce the problems and development road blocks often encountered when developing software using state-based unit tests. A few exercises will be presented and worked on by the class with the assistance of the instructors. The third and longest part of the tutorial will introduce the concept and benefits of interaction-based unit testing. The purpose and use of mock objects will be described and the use of dynamic mock generation libraries will be demonstrated. Examples and exercises based on interaction-testing will follow.

Speaker Bio

Scott joined Atomic Object in May of 2005 and brought a considerable amount of application development experience with him. After working as an independent consultant as a means of paying for school, Scott began working as a developer full time in the late 80s. He has lead or participated in a wide range of projects including Kitchen & Bath design, Automotive job costing, Explosives detection, Golf and hockey league management, Internet-based file sharing, and several applications in the textile and apparel design field.

At the same time, he has picked up extensive experience in many computer languages and development environments. Among these are C, C++, C#, Java, Html, and Python. In addition to working on cool projects for our clients, Scott has spent a lot of time lately presenting many aspects of our software design beliefs and methods at several local and national software developer conferences.

When not developing software, Scott enjoys spending time with his wife and two young sons. The rest of his free time (let’s see, that works out to about 19 minutes per month) is spent golfing, tending goal for his rec league hockey team, and playing in the occasional poker game or tournament (no TV appearances yet, alas).

Summer Conference Reprise

When: October 23, 2007

Atomic Object developers attended the Agile conference, Google Test Automation Conference, OSCON, and RailsConf this summer.

This meeting will be organized like last year’s successful reprise of the Agile conference. A panel of conference attendees will talk about what they found most valuable in the tutorials, workshops, talks, and open space of the conferences. Questions are welcome and the discussion is always interesting.

Come to hear:

Carl Erickson – interaction design and agile software development, mutually incompatible or ying/yang?

Bill Bereza – Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs applied to software development

Karlin Fox – Google testing practices

Zach Dennis – bleeding razor Rails edge

Scott Miller – the Agile / Lean connection

Matt Fletcher – the impact of TDD on the structural properties of source code

When Will Microsoft Go Out of Business?

Who: Ken Schwaber, Advanced Development Methods, Inc

When: September 25, 2007

One reason to go out of business is that your competition takes away your customers with better, more-innovative, higher quality products. There are ways to slow the loss of your customers, but the end can be modeled. This workshop will look at how to model when Microsoft will go out of business, why it will go out of business, and some things it could undertake to slow this trend down or reverse it. The same techniques that we’ll use for looking at Microsoft can be used applied to any business that systems, including your own.

Speaker Bio

Ken Schwaber is an advocate of Agile processes and Scrum. He is the co-developer of the Scrum process, signatory to the Agile Manifesto, and founder of the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance. He has developed and managed software development for over thirty years.

Notes on June Open Space Meeting

Thanks to Dave Limbaugh for facilitating the Open Space meeting!  For those who missed it (or just want more), see the links below: June 2007 Meeting Notes 

See photos from the meeting on Flickr.