GuillaumeTardif

We’ve now moved to the second half of the Agile 2009 conference. As I was told, this is quite a huge conference, lots of people, lots of different sessions, some space for additional unscheduled sessions, … Just too many things for one mind. Two ideas that keep coming again and again are :

1. Experience cannot be replaced by anything else.
2. Regarding code writing : Expressiveness has been mentionned several times as one of the top-3 keys to quality code.

Monday was a big day four Eric Lefevre and myself, as we were animating a coding dojo session on the theme “adding functionality to lecgacy code”.
We had planned to ask for a dozen volunteers to participate and take turns coding on our Monopoly example.It turned out we were about ten people in the room, so we didn’t need to ask for volunteers, we had the perfect size crowd for the exercise.We used Test Driven Development (of course!) during the session. This is also a good mean for measuring what we can archieve during one hour of coding, and to have a garantee that we end up with working software.
The session went with quite passionnate discusions about what we should do next, the scope of tests, etc. Eventually, one of the major take away from this session was that pair programming is not easy. This is probably even more true in this context were people didn’t know each other before the session, they didn’t know each other way of thinking, coding habits, etc. 
We did actually run the same exercise with people doing weekly dojo session in Paris and managed to get more functionality implemented, probably because people were a little bit used to coding with each other. 
Eric also managed to perform at the “Programing with the stars” contest during lunchtime,  where there were fantastic teams, jury and a great presenter, who managed to make this event look like a TV show with suspense, loud music, applause and all. 

All in all, a pretty good day to begin this conference. 
I’ll add more about sessions I attended in other articles.

Highlight of this week : XPDay Paris on monday/tuesday. I liked the agileFairyTales games with snow white and the 7 dwarfs (see http://www.agilefairytales.com/mirror.html), Arnaud Bailly’s presentation on how a test solution typically progresses to become over-complex (great presentation especially in this 30 mins not-so-easy format, dense and still easy to follow).

Unfortunately I had to leave the presentation by Regis Medina and Antoine Contal regarding XP + Lean before the end (and I missed Regis’ presentation about Théorie des centres). But take a look there… interesting stuff.

Eric Lefevre and I presented a discussion session “Scrum est-il dangereux?” (not so good translation of “Is Scrum Evil?”). Notes from the session are available on pictures here.

Also, this was the opportunity to meet people (the usual suspects but also some good surprises, people I hadn’t seen in years). All this in the really cool site La porte Jaune, very nice.

More details and download available here

Amongst other things, it includes cross project search, calendar and gant with issue filtering, editable watchers list, and many more…

This is done eventually! I now have a blog, as everyone else.