I planned to write individual posts about new and upcoming workshops, but the rate at which we get invited and accepted to conferences this fall outstrips my ability to post new entries I have to post now, before the conferences themselves are over… I hope you’ll join us for at least one of these. We’ll be doing some hard-core programming workshops as well as more enterprise and facilitation oriented sessions this fall.

First up is Scan-Agile next Thursday and Friday in Helsinki, Finland. Marc already wrote about our Story Testing workshop.  I’m also very much looking forward to participating in the Scan-Agile Open Space, which now has its’ own day.  The main reason for me to return to Scan-Agile this year, is that last year it had very strong participants (and presenters, but good session organizers are only part of what makes a conference worthwile). Having my own unit tests ripped to shreds by critical participants was interesting and valuable. So I’m glad this year all participants get more space. We had some discussion on Twitter about ‘is kanban a failure mode of lean? (and what that means if it is so)’ that merits more than 140 characters… should make for lively open space as everybody involved in that discussion will be there . If I haven’t motivated you to join us, check out Vasco Duarte’s series of motivational posts about Scan-Agile.

Next up is the Practical Product Lines conference , October 20 and 21 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. There we will be hosting a value stream mapping workshop, as described by Marc. We decided to try out more conferences outside our regular schedule of agile conferences – preaching to the choir is fun, and helps us improve our understanding, but going out into the world and sharing what we’ve learned is at leas as valuable. We thought it would be interesting to bring our understanding of value stream mapping, and take participants’ experiences with product lines, should provide an interesting mix.

Freek Leemhuis of Devnology asked us to send in some proposals for the Devnology community day, saturday November 7 in Baarn, Netherlands.  We did, and they chose three of QWAN’s sessions for the program:

Refactoring to concurrency (with Scala) grew out of a series of commits I did for a product I’m developing with Marc, micro-ISV style. We needed some background processing to make our application more responsive, and I wanted to take small steps, be sure that it worked and have everything covered with tests. So I first refactored, until introducing concurrency was just a one character change. This session shows you how to do the same thing, with scala or another language.

Flying Horses – cleaner code in other languages. This session was inspired by a dojo description from Emily Bache (I don’t have the link handy right now, will insert it later). Rob ran with it and tried it out at Agile Open Holland last month. We’ll bring an application written in one language, everybody gets their laptops, a pair to program with and translates that to their favourite language. At first as literally as possible, and then make it ‘more like their language’. Then we will discuss what makes code, e.g. pythonic, javaic, C-sharpish etc. based on the examples we just created.

Give your code some love is a demonstration (a series of prepared katas) of us doing tiny refactorings on code that looks allright at first glance. Tiny refactorings then show that there are quite a lot of things we can do to make the code express its’ intent better. This session was heavily inspired by Ivan Moor and British Mike Hill ’s Programming In The Small workshop at the software craftsmanship conference in London earlier this year.

Jfall, conference of the Dutch Java Users’ group, November 11 in Bussum, Netherlands, sees Rob and me doing TDD As If You Meant It, inspired by Keith Braithwaite’s session of the same name at, again, the software crafsmanship conference in London. Keith kindly gave us permission to reuse the name. We are happy to see more people applying unit testing. Very few, however, seem to be really doing Test Driven Development. In this demonstration we hope to give the audience a taste of what test-first programming can do for you.

Xp Days Benelux, November 23 and 24, Mechelen, Belgium I already described Retrospective Hero with Nicole Belilos of Task24 and Agile Politics – (re)discover the politician in you at XP Days Benelux with Emmanuel Gaillot of Pyxis

and Finally, XpDay London, December 7 and 8th where I’ll be pair facilitating the Open Space with Rachel Davies.

Wille Faler asked on Twitter earlier this week about how people who go to conferences a lot do work. All of the conferences above are one, maximum two days, that leaves plenty of time in the rest of the week to do ‘actual’ work.  The other thing is, writing is a poor medium (for me at least, even though my blog does seem to travel reasonably well these days) to show our passion for software development, going out to conferences helps us connect with other people who are equally passionate about our profession. And sometimes this then leads to actual work. Which leads me to the following:

Shameless plug:

At the moment I’m looking for a new project to work on, either as a developer, agile coach and/or project leader. contact me if you know of a place where my skills would add value. Also, all of the sessions above and more are available as customized in-house training.

After running it in-house (Marc and I are travelling to Switzerland in two weeks to do just that ), we are now happilly responding to demand for an open-enrollment Unit Testing Masterclass. In this class we practice more Test- and Behaviour-driven development in small steps, you will experience various mocking techniques as well as how (not) to make tests that you and your colleagues can understand.

First courses planned are 8,99 and 22,23 September in Tilburg, Netherlands. See the course page for a full description and the booking form to reserve your space. We are looking forward to meeting you there!

One of the few courses that goes in-depth in both Agile planning practices as well as technical practices. See the course page for a full description.

Tijdens Agile2008 in Toronto faciliteren we de workshop “Agile and labour turnover – Should I stay or should I go?” Op 17 Juni gaan we deze proefdraaien, om met jouw feedback de workshop nog beter te maken

Tijdens deze workshop onderzoeken we samen met de deelnemers welk effect de introductie van een agile methodiek heeft op het verloop van werknemers binnen het bedrijf of de afdeling.

Is het echt, zoals sommigen schrijven, dat 20% vrijwillig of gedwongen vertrekt? Of neemt het verloop juist af, omdat een Agile werkwijze leidt tot een grotere tevredenheid over het werk en de sfeer? En wat doe je met mensen die een hekel hebben aan deze nieuwe manier van werken, maar die, om allerlei andere redenen, toch blijven zitten?

De deelnemers brengen hun eigen verhalen en situaties in kaart met behulp van oorzaak-gevolg diagramman (systeemdenken). Dankzij deze diagrammen worden patronen in kaart gebracht, zodat die een volgende keer doorbroken kunnen worden.

Nieuwsgierig? Lees de volledige beschrijving van de sessie en schrijf je in!
Voordat we naar Toronto afreizen willen we onze sessie graag een keer proefdraaien, zodat we onze sessie met behulp van onze feedback-verslaving nog beter kunnen maken.

De proefsessie is 17 juni op het kantoor van Topic in Best (www.topic.nl).

Het programma ziet er als volgt uit:

17:15 – 18:00 Ontvangst met een broodje
* 18:00 – 19:30 Agile and labour turnover – proefsessie
* 19:30 – 20:00 Evaluatie van de sessie
* 20:00 – 20:30 Napraten met een drankje
*
Wil je ons helpen een goede sessie te maken? En/Of ben je gewoon benieuwd naar wat we in Toronto gaan doen? Stuur dan een mailtje, zodat we rekening kunnen houden met jouw komst.

Hopelijk tot 17 juni!

Nicole Belilos

Willem van den Ende