ReflectionsOnSoftwarePracticeAdvancement

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In the closing plenary we gathered post-it notes listing lessons learned and insights gained at the conference:

  • There are more ghosts in Cambridge than expected!
  • I can improve my learning by increasing my toolbox.
  • Dealing with non-functional requirements is hard - but doubly so on agile projects. You need to use your professional experience to stand up to the customer and make clear what they cost (and the risks).
  • Make use of the 'four phases' for running our larger products.
  • More people are interested in code generation than I thought
  • Consider developing a Perl compiler for Ruby on Rails! (if you work at the beeb)
  • Find out what motivates you and use that to design your job.
  • Design by Contract is an interesting way to think about testing.
  • The big gap between the books and reality - the missing manual.
  • Everything moves so fast - you have to keep learning!
  • 10 things I knew but forgot have come back to the front of mind.
  • Very glad we use Scrum not XP!
  • I should 'mock' more objects to reduce the runtimes of my test suite
  • How to handle external influences on an agile project team.
  • "A Good Read" showed how much stuff is out there that could help if only we could find the time to read it.
  • JMock
  • Using Scrum for non-deliverable tasks.
  • I am rubish at croquet.
  • "Creativity in Practice" -> activities you can do to encourage creativity.
  • "Creativity in Practice" session was very good. It promoted 'out of the box' thinking.
  • Revisit TDD with JMock.
  • "The Scoping Game" session was excellent - it put product management trade-offs 'in my face'.
  • PHP has problems but it does the job.
  • There is no common understanding of how to deal with NFR on Agile Projects.
  • Java headaches growing.
  • What's it worth to keep a system running?
  • There are conflicts between testing and encapsulation.
  • Brainstorming technique
  • Rose champagne is not pink
  • Not all vintage champagne tastes good.
  • Learned that ENVY was an OTI product for Smalltalk.
  • Learned a lot about how to lead sessions.
  • Getting to know a lot of interesting people.
  • Getting a lot of new ideas to more detail.
  • The problems with agile (management, architecture, failures) are coming out. Now it's "okay to talk about it".
  • Vista API's incompatible with .NET
  • The basics behind Design by Contract.
  • Simple vs Bottomline of Life Expectancy
  • Meeting Dave Thomas
  • Eclipse Exploration
  • Tools for exploring code with Eclipse.
  • Ideas to improve my workshop.
  • Test oracle.
  • Erlang
  • Parallel state machines might work.
  • Metaphors - a useful tool for thinking.
  • Formal specs are back !?
  • Multi-paradigms are needed.
  • Exemplar-based modelling
  • Declarative Rules.
  • Agile Modelling -> Factoty is extra fine for innovation projects to create v-prototypes to find ideal solutions.
  • What about post-Java?
  • Some cool code browsing plugins for Eclipse.
  • Java is legacy.
  • People and their enthusiasm is inspiring.
  • The PC and Web ruined the field, because now geeks could get rich.
  • Microsoft will open-source Windows to improve quality.
  • XP "practices" are engineering disciplines. Software engineering is dead (we can't call it that because engineering has an unglamorous image) but long live software engineering anyway.
  • "Turning up the Heat on Agile projects" -> Optimizing team dynamics.
  • Disaster recovery is really hard.
  • Andy Moorley is Superman
  • Hire "trained killers" or at least one (some tasks require not your average software engineer).
  • Conference admin is hard.
  • You shouldn't really each a cooked breakfast every morning!
  • Mike Feathers is such a nice guy
  • Tim Mackinnon is not a wine buff.
  • Business Analysts are bad at capturing non-functional requirements.
  • What am I going to do for a living?
  • Everyone's doing agile in SPA, that's not the picture "out there".
  • Lessons learned from Agile proactices on innovative projects.
  • Tests in TDD can be big overhead.
  • Some presentations indicated failings in Agile.
  • Different techniques for estimating such as "poker".
  • Observation, Interpretation, Conculsion.
  • I need to stop being entertaining in talks.
  • People still think CS matters!
  • Where are the cow magnets?
  • There is hope for large-scale XP!
  • End-user programming, sort of in a domain -> bloody users they'll screw up ... but an ultimate pair may help.
  • You can provoke creative thinking.
  • Take out from Monday: I want to learn more about Javascript, Ajax and web 2.0 technologies generally. I will encounter these in mu work and need at least to have played with them.
  • Practical assertions.
  • Make more use of assertions.
  • We have and will have a lot of CPU/RAM let's use it to be more productive.
  • Multi-paradigm programming.
  • I discovered that Smalltalk rocks!
  • Need to learn Haskell as well as Smalltalk and Monads for next year /:-(
  • Eclipse tooling
  • Planning poker
  • Topic maps - up and coming potentially useful tool
  • Power of metaphor
  • How to taste champagne
  • Multi-language programming -> including Smalltalk and C%2b%2b .. cool!!
  • Impact of non-functional requirements continuity and error handling on architecture.
  • Clustered state diagrams.
  • Assertions much more important than I realised.
  • Javascript rocks
  • Javascript is a real language
  • Serious javascript
  • Anti-patterns and how to identify.
  • We're still reinventing the wheel.
  • What is Web 2.0? a debate, a social phenomenon, has blogs that can be classified as a) marketing, b) pamphleteering and possibly c) "postcards home".
  • Half of the people are in the model-drive post-code world, the other hald is very confident about programming.
  • Language wars are alive and well ...! and still raging
  • I like Dave Thomas because he does not agree we overexcited software evangalists.
  • No one knows what Enterprise Architecture really is!
  • Agile probably does not work unless everyone around you does
  • API design
  • Javascript is as I expected (Scheme with too much syntax)
  • New thoughts on testing
  • What WDF and WCF are.
  • Plato's cave model.
  • Everyone loves Smalltalk but few people use it.
  • 75% of software engineering undergrads don't want to be programmers


Suggestions for next year:

  • Sake at tasting event
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