But it works on my PC!

Thanks to everyone who turned up for my presentation on Typemock and Sharepoint in Glasgow last night. I have just upload my slides onto the Black Marble site. As the session was quite demo driven the slides don’t offer the best code samples. If you want to experiment yourselves I would suggest you look at my related posts on this blog and remember if you don’t have Typemock you can download trial versions of all the products I used from www.typemock.com

Don’t forget this month’s Agile Yorkshire meeting is this Wednesday at the Victoria Hotel in Leeds. It is the usual mix of free beer, great conversation and an excellent speaker (note: you can assign your own ranking order as these factors, using a suitable Agile planning model).

This month the speaker is Nancy Van Schooenderwoert on ‘Seven Paradoxes of Agile Software Development’.

Hope to see you there.

DD-SW in Taunton seems to go well, a big thank you to Guy and the rest of the Bristol .NET user group for all their work getting this event up and running. Also it was nice to see new faces, it is certainly a good idea to get the DDD family events out to places beyond Reading, spreading the good works of the community across the country.

Thank you to those who attended my session on Scrum, I hope you all found it useful. You can find a virtually identical set the slides on the Black Marble web site and the actual stack I used will be up on the DD-SW site soon.

I actually managed to attend some sessions this time, as usual this just means more work as I invariably realise I have to spend some time on learning some new technologies This time it was MEF and jQuery, the latter  technology I have ignored too long. It was also great to see a truly mind bending session by Marc Gravell on Expression trees, we need to see more of these deep dive sessions a community events. I have never checked to see if is it that they are not proposed or that they are not voted for? Can it be true the community just wants level 200 general overviews?

Anyway another great day – a pointer to everyone that if you haven’t been to DDD event you really should.

It is Developer Day South West this weekend where I will be speaking on Scrum. I may also do a lunch time grok talk on SharePoint and Typemock Isolator as I did at Developer Day Scotland.

I think there are still spaces at this event, so if you can make your way down to Taunton on Saturday I think it will be well worth the trip.

I was unable to attend the last Agile Yorkshire meeting, shame it sounds like it was a good one. The slides are up and give a really nice overview of the theory behind exploratory testing, worth a look at http://www.agileyorkshire.org/2009-event-announcements/may13th-exploratorytesting/ExploratoryTesting.ppt

I had an enjoyable day at Developer Day Scotland in Glasgow yesterday; a big thank you to the organisers and speakers.

I did a short grok talk on ‘Testing Sharepoint using Typemock Isolator and Ivonna’, a few people asked me for more details. Well the session was based on a post I did a while ago. I have updated that post to tidy a couple of issue I found whilst preparing the session. If you need more details of the potential pitfalls in using these tools I suggest you also look at the MVC post I did a few days ago as this details the setup you need to get it going.

I will also be doing a longer session on the same subject at some user groups later in the summer

I will be speaking on developer testing of SharePoint projects using Typemock at both the Birmingham and Manchester NXtGen user groups in August.

For more details check the NxtGen site.

If you are in Newcastle on the evening of the 22nd I will be speaking at Vbug on Visual Studio 2008 Database Edition.

Hope to see you there.

Looking forward to seeing everyone at Alt.Net ‘in the North’ over the next two days.

If you cannot make the planning session tonight, but are in Bradford later, we will be in the Titus Salt Pub for a few drinks sponsored by SEED software. We will probably be upstairs from about 8:30pm

I got round to listening to the latest Radio TFS podcast today whist out for a run, Adopting Team System with Steve Borg. If you are looking at adopting TFS or even just critically looking at your development life cycle with a view to improving (irrespective of the tools you use), then this podcast is well worth the time to listen to. It actually covers a lot of the points I was discussing at the Agile Yorkshire user group this week in my session of Crystal Clear. By now I would usually have put my slide stack up for all to download, but in this case, as my session was a book review in essence I would like you to read the original Crystal Clear by Alistair Cockburn.

In my opinion, the key point they both raise is the that it is important to have a process that provides:

• Safety – provides a framework that means the project can safely be delivered
• Efficiency – development should be in an efficient manner
• Habitable – that the team can live with the process (if they can’t the process will be avoided/subverted)

Or to put it another way (and quoting here from the Crystal Clear book) “a little methodology does a lot of good, after that weight is costly”

A point raised at the user group in the chat after my session was that of how to get senior people (such as CEO, CFO etc) to buy into the ‘new’ development process (a critical factor for success). Too often it is heard “I don’t care if you are agile or not, I just want it delivered” and no support is provided beyond the actual coding team from the business. A good discussion of this type of problem is in Gojko Adzic’s book Bridging the Communication Gap: Specification by Example and Agile Acceptance Testing. This is written for non software developers and discusses how to make sure that the whole business is involved in the development process, thus enabling the project to deliver what the business really needs not what people think they need. I would say this book is an essential for anyone involved in the software specifications process – and that should be everyone in an agile project!