These evening gatherings are the perfect opportunity to chat with speakers and your fellow attendees in an informal, relaxed setting.

WHAT MAKES AGILE PROJECTS SUCCEED (OR FAIL)?

MONDAY, JULY 21, 7:00 PM–8:30 PM
Chris Sims

“Our project succeeded because we...” Our project failed because we didn't...” Have you been involved in an agile project? What made it succeed or fail? Come share your experience and tap into the collective wisdom that will be present. We are going to compile a list of the most important ingredients for success. We will use the Nominal Group Technique (NGT) to gather up the group's experiences and ideas. NGT works faster than traditional brainstorming, yet generates more complete and higher quality results. Next we will identify the factors that have had the biggest impact using DOTS, a technique that efficiently harnesses the collective wisdom of the group, while avoiding groupthink.

This is really two workshops for the price of one. You will walk out with a better understanding of what makes agile projects succeed, as well as how to use NGT and DOTS to tap into the wisdom and knowledge of a group.

 
FAKING IT - TROUBLESHOOTING MOCKS, STUBS, AND FAKES

WEDNESDAY, JULY 23, 7:00 PM–8:30 PM
Ryan Breidenbach & Rod Coffin

In this workshop we will discuss common issues with mocks, stubs and fakes, and share techniques for effectively enabling testability. Often testing code which depends on third-party libraries or legacy code can be difficult because of issues with static methods and fields, final classes, access control, external resources, the lack of extensible interfaces, etc. Mocks, stubs and fakes are one solution for these types of problems, but they carry with them their own challenges. Several common real-world scenarios will be presented and discussed but participants are also encouraged to come armed with their own experiences and questions to discuss. As a group we will explore solutions and share our experiences with writing tests for these situations. Attendees will learn new techniques from the presenters and each other for tackling difficult testing problems.

THE PRODUCTIVE PROGRAMMER

WEDNESDAY, JULY 23, 7:00 PM–8:30 PM
Neal Ford

Developers from the 1980s would be shocked at how inefficiently developers use their computers because of the advent of graphical operating systems. This talk describes how to reclaim productivity afforded by intelligent use of command lines and other ways of accelerating your interaction with the computer and bending computers to do your bidding. In The Productive Programmer, I identify 4 principles of productivity, and this talk describes them. The primary focus of this talk is on real-world examples of how you can use these principles to make yourself a more productive programmer. The principles are automation, acceleration, focus and canonicality. Stop working so hard for your computer! This talk shows you how.