The uptake of Agile and Alt.Net practices in places a bit away from the major development hotspots
Last week I got into an interesting discussion via email with Nieve a developer from Lille, France.The chat was on the uptake of Agile and Alt.Net practices in places a bit away from the major development hotspots. We both thought it could make an interesting post so, here goes, starting with Nieve’s first post…..
Hello there,I've stumbled upon your blog while googling for the terms alt.net yorkshire.I'm a .NET developer working in Paris and living in the north of France (Lille area). Now, the reason I'm writing is that we're having an alt.net lunch next month, and I would like to talk a bit about the differences between the (alt).net communities in france and england. Now since I did my studies in Leeds, the fact that yorkshire and la région du nord are (surprise surprise) in the north (plus a shared history of mines) brought me to google for alt.net and yorkshire.Over here in Lille/the north of France the situation is rather grim. job offers that entail agile practices and or tools in .NET environment are as rare as an eclipse, managers and developers alike are literally afraid of any framework/tool that isn't microsoft yet somehow miraculously written in a .net language. I suppose you get the picture. I was wondering if you would mind sharing with me (and/or others, on your blog) your thoughts on the situation in yorkshire.
My reply
I don't know if you have heard of Ian Cooper, he was one of the organisers of the ALT.NET events in the UK. Well he just posted on his blog on a subject very close to your question http://codebetter.com/blogs/ian_cooper/archive/2010/01/19/whither-alt-net.aspx
In my opinion there has not been a drop of in interest over the tools and practices of ALT.NET but it has lost it’s label a bit. Ian is right the main people pushing it have moved more towards Twitter etc. which has reduced visibility if you don't follow them.
Local groups are still on the go. I myself attend Agile Yorkshire http://www.agileyorkshire.org/ which is a group driven by development process (being JAVA and .NET) but did help organise the ALT.NET in the North event last year. We hope to run something this year, but we doubt it will be under the ALT.NET banner as it was felt this alienated JAVA members
As to who is using the tools, no as many as I would hope. But you find them in surprising places. I found out that a dev teams in the NHS (usually known to be very bureaucratic and fixed management process) are using Kanban, nHibernate etc. and finding them useful. Getting adoption is all down to someone showing there is an advantage, the problem is so few people in our industry care about improving their skills, it all comes back as Ian said to the software craftsmanship movement
Nieve again
First of all let me begin by saying I only wish I could tell you how much I am thankful. Reading Ian's post was a something of an epiphany moment :) At some points he brought it so close to home that I had to stop and think 'hold on, is he just talking about software development or is there a hidden message about the state of France..?' Over here it's not only the IT industry that breeds this sort of position holders that are fine where they are and just won't bother changing anything. I always think of it as 'with all that revolution going on, you don't get any evolution'; the idea is that everyone here are jumping to their feet and straight to the street to cry against whatever change that is offered, that nothing ever gets to change hence no evolution...
To get back to the issue in question, I think one of the things Ian, and for that matter many of the ALT.NET people, tend to forget or simply overlook is the fact that while at some parts of the world people may think the battle was won, or that it's about time to wake up from our comfortable twitter hibernation, in some other parts the battle hasn't even began, which brings me back to my original question. See, you guys up the in England and esp. in the north can be very proud of your community, and not only the alt.net/agile/software development/IT one, but also the local-geographical community. I had to go and look for a job in Paris, which entails a couple of hours on the train each and every day and which is bound to end by leaving Lille (and no wonder I'm considering moving back to yorkshire); Not only developers and managers are afraid of anything that is not microsoft, the actual idea of software craftsmanship is an abnormality in our region. There is a Nord-agile group that works here and have meetings every couple of months and consists of 5 to 7 people, none of them a .net person. And we're talking about a huge region and one of france's 5 biggest cities.
With that in mind, there's also the fact that roughly each and every year a new generation of developers is arriving to the market which makes it even more difficult to those (esp the beginners to senior-juniors) who wants to learn and work on their coding craftsmanship. (I remember I discovered the alt.net manifest only a couple of years ago or so, and soon after I remember reading a post of Ayende saying he's going to give Twitter a shot. Thank god, he's one of those who never stopped blogging.)
As for Paris, things seem to be closer to what Ian said; there are a lot more job offers that ask for a working experience in NH, MVC, NUnit etc', however this feels like the new orthodoxy.
… and me again
So to me this shows that the problem we both see are not just down to us at our company/technology/region/country. Craftsman Developers everywhere tend to sit in small isolated pockets, even in large conurbations, and there is nothing to go but to organise locally where you can, go on go for a beer you know you want to, and to join in the virtual communities to get a bigger world view.
Wow, that sounds like a call to revolution, better go into hiding in case the thought people come round, I know I will just have to think I am not in!