The ThoughtWorks Agile Southeast Conference

I'm taking a quick reprieve from my How to Land a Job as a Software Engineer series to write about a very informative and enjoyable event I attended this Tuesday. ThoughtWorks held its first professional conference in the Southeast and a friend of mine who is a thought worker invited me to go. It was a well organized event and several noteworthy thought workers presented.

We kicked off the day by listening to a keynote by Neal Ford called, "Why, Not How." Neal pointed out that there is solid evidence that agile works, but that few people investigate why it works. That is to say, the talk focused on why agile works rather than how to work agile. There was a great deal of merit to the things he said about the psychology and biology behind the effectiveness and efficiency of agile methods. This was one of my favorite talks, perhaps because it appealed to my background in behavioral neuroscience research at Duke, my experience getting my MBA, as well as my interest in becoming a better programmer. If only he had said something about airplanes it would've been perfect.

The breakout sessions started after Neal's keynote allowing us to chose between the management track and the technology track. I generally stuck with the management track. Just kidding. But, I wish I could've been in two places at once and I'll explain why shortly.

The first breakout session I went to discussed code metrics, tools for gathering metrics, and ways to interpret metrics. In fact, the significant interest in measurement may be one of my favorite aspects to the agile method. I suppose it appeals to my empirical nature; after all, if you can't observe it, it didn't happen. :)

Next, Anthony Pitluga and Ali Aghareza talked about cloud computing. They made an interesting distinction to me regarding Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Services (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). They also pointed out a use for cloud computing that I can really get behind. Just so you know, I think there are very few instances where cloud computing is better than having your own infrastructure, but I believe these fellas were right on when they said it's perfect for testing. I mean, you can spin up (on demand mind you) a full test environment that very closely mimics your production environment on Amazon's EC2. Imagine that! Rather than doubling your capex to get two (or god forbid) three duplicate environments, you just build, test, and deploy your solution to EC2. You bang on it for as long as you need and the whole testing cycle costs a few hundred an hour. Very clever indeed.

I switched over to the management track for Saleem Siddiqui's talk about software complexity. He talked about essential complexity and incidental complexity in software, making a distinction between complexity that has to be in software and complexity that just sort of happens. Then, he talked about why it's better to focus on the latter rather than the former because, well, the former has to be there. He's a well spoken and interesting speaker to be sure.

After that, we took a much needed lunch break and had some really good food (although there was a vegimarian behind me in line who seemed to disagree, but since I'm a meatitarian I didn't notice). During lunch, Scott Conley gave his keynote about Platforms and innovation. As ThoughtWorks Chief Strategy Officer, Scott knows a lot about innovation and he's damn good at talking about it. Despite the incessant tinging of forks on plates, I got a lot out of Scott's talk.

After lunch, I went back to the technical track and enjoyed Graham Brooks's talk about testing web applications. He showed us a framework he's been working on that allows him to apply test driven development techniques to web applications.

Next, Dave Vollbracht talked about the perils of allowing everyone to have a unique development environment. It's important to note, though, that he didn't say anything about being able to try new tools. Basically, he said that if a team member finds a great tool and starts using it, that everybody should have it as well. That way, the machine you are working on may not be the same piece of hardware, but the environment will always be identical. That makes it much easier to image new development machines, to engage in paired programming, or to share team members with other teams. Dave also talked about several methods to achieve this uniformity.

Really, the biggest downside is that I couldn't be in both breakout sessions at the same time. I would really have enjoyed Ross Pettit's talk about Budgeting and the Financial Implications of Agile and I'm sure I would have loved to hear about Gregory Reiser's experience with offshore development. Can agile make offshore development actually work? I guess I won't know until next time.

Speaking of next time, I'll definitely be there and I'll be bringing friends. It was a good conference, and I enjoyed getting the ThoughtWorks perspective. I hope the next one will have a lot more attendance because I'd love to get other perspectives too.