Atoms share conference experience at XPwm

Atomic and our developers invest a lot of time in professional development. Everyone attends at least one conference or workshop each year. This year we presented at or attended the following:

• Austin Workshop on Test Automation
• Embedded Systems Conference
• Rails Conference
• Dr. Dobb’s Architecture and Design World
• Agile Conference
• O’Reilly Open Source Convention
• Google Test Automation Conference
• Ruby Conference

The October meeting of XP West Michigan featured “what I did on my summer vacation” talks from Atomic Object developers. Five atoms gave short, informal talks on interesting things they learned at recent conferences.

Karlin Fox posted his own blog entry on Google’s interesting test practices from GTAC 2007.

Matt Fletcher summarized Keith Braithwaite’s preliminary research concerning the impact on code structure from developing with TDD. In a nutshell, TDD appears to, in a measurable fashion, reduce complexity and change the distribution of complexity in a body of source. Atomic has long observed that we create larger numbers of smaller, simpler classes when doing TDD. We’ve even created tools that help with class and interface creation to address this overhead. Our belief has always been that TDD pushes us towards creating simpler, easier-to-test and understand code. Keith’s research suggests that TDD measurably simplifies code.

During Matt’s talk, Paul Vanderlei brought up the interesting point that an equally valid possible explanation of the observed phenomenon was that better programmers produce simpler code. There’s lots more research to be done in this very interesting area.

Zach Dennis summarized a talk he attended at the Agile Conference given by Scott Ambler on software development and databases. He covered both the relationship between DBAs and developers and techniques for improving the quality and maintenance of database schemas. Zach then demo’d these ideas put into practice in the context of a Rails application. The Rails idea of migrations, and the Atomic standard of testing our migrations, seems to achieve a great deal of what Scott describes as a better approach to data.

Bill Bereza gave an abbreviated version of a talk by Rolf Skyberg on Maslow’s Hierarchy applied to software development. Rolf works for EBay and offered the original talk at OSCon. Bill set a record with 281 slides presented in 14 minutes. Sounds crazy, and you really had to be there, but it was informative, amusing, and brought home some really great points about what it takes to build a successful software project.

Scott Miller summarized the link between the Japanese idea of continual improvement, kaizen, and agile adoption. He was inspired by a presentation Mary Poppendieck gave at the Agile conference. Scott’s feeling is that one of the inherent beliefs in kaizen (all workers being able to make improvement suggestions) when applied to the early agile methodologies such as Extreme Programming, was a key to the natural adaptation and spread of agile practices.