Conference workshops – the second quarter
A bit late, as the first conference – SPA2009 – has already passed 
. It was great, more about that later. We already put the write-up for Consulting Without Secrets up on the SPA wiki, Sea Stories and Fairy tales is yet to follow.
Tomorrow, April 15, Rob Westgeest, Marc Evers and I will represent QWAN with Giving your code some love at jspring in Bussum, NL. This session is heavily inspired by Ivan Moore and Mike Hills’ performance at the Software Craftsmanship Conference. After the first line you write, your code is in maintenance. After that, the devil is in the details. We will show that even code that looks fairly decent can benefit from some more love and care.
Next up, on May 11 is Mini XP Days Benelux, where we will do a re-vamped version of Executable story specifications with RSpec with Marc Evers. Mini XP Days sees the most popular sessions of XP Days re-run. We got, ehm, sufficient ideas for improvement at XP Days last year, so even the title might change. What will not change is that it will be a practical session with live ‘coding’ on ‘specification’ by example.
With XP2009 we had a happy accident. Quite a number of sessions got in. I was asked to organize the Open Space together with Lasse Koskela, and then decided if we were going anyway, it would be fun to do some workshops and maybe tutorials as well.
Marc and I had been ruminating for a long time, we wanted to develop some a simulation game for product development. This has finally resulted in The New New NEW! Product Development Game. Participants will compare several ‘new’ ways of planning (e.g. User Story Mapping, Dimensional Planning / Dimensional Pull, and Kanban) by doing. We will provide a sample project with user stories etc, they will make plannings in groups and then we will compare notes.
We thought it would be a fun change – since last year we have developed a lot of new technical material, which we continue to do. The New New NEW! Product Development Game will also feature as part of a (non-technical) Product Development course we are developing.
Lasse suggested we do a Scrapheap Challenge, since we both enjoyed the PostModern Programming conference Ivan Moore organized a couple of years ago a lot. This workshop will use the Internet as a giant Scrapheap, providing interesting bits and pieces to create an application in no-time. May the best team win!
Last, but not least, Marc and I will run the hands-on tutorial version of Promise is Debt – System Dynamics of Technical Debt. In which we introduce diagrams of effect as a way to understand how technical debt is created, and participants get to work on their own solutions.
I will probably add some more dates to the calendar (for instance the Open Space Code Day in June) as the quarter progresses. I hope to meet you during at least one of these events!
