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XP West Michigan '09 Kicks Off with Doug Bradbury of 8th Light

Posted on September 24th, 2009 by Mike Swieton

The evening of September 22nd marked the kick off for the 2009 season of XP West Michigan. We were very happy to host Doug Bradbury from the company 8th Light, a noted Chicago-area agile software development firm. Doug’s topic was titled “Software Craftsmanship: Raising the Bar of Professional Software Development”.

In his presentation, Doug argued that creating software bears more in common with a craft such as carpentry than with the work that civil engineers do, shedding the common misnomer of the idea of a “software engineer”. Software is a craft in that we work with our hands (and keyboards) directly with the raw material of our art (code). Developers craft a product directly, rather than making a design or blueprints like an architect.

One of the aspects of a craft is that it is more than just having some knowledge and theorems: it’s a matter of being well practiced and skilled. Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outliers: The Story of Success, tells us that empirically it seems to take about 10,000 hours for someone to become good at something. Watch this short video to hear Gladwell expand on his idea here.

XP West Michigan is just getting started and we’ve got a great year planned. Remember that you can always see the latest schedule on the XP West Michigan web site.

See you all next month for Jon Wettersten’s presentation “Creative Process as Seen Through Creative Language”. Jon is a senior application developer and design strategist for IDEO, a mulit-national design consultancy.

If you’re interested in software craftsmanship, consider joining the mailing list.

Edit 9/27 One of our members, Jerry Van Baren, pointed me to this link describing a process where a group of craftsman built a fully custom car from the ground up. It’s a good example of craftsmanship: no education or schooling will give you the ability to pound out the aluminum body by hand as they did – it takes practice and experience. Software is the same way – understanding the principles is a necessary foundation, but you need practice and experience to build complex systems.



2 Responses to “XP West Michigan '09 Kicks Off with Doug Bradbury of 8th Light”

  1. shaheenery Says:

    September 25th, 2009 at 03:23 PM

    Thank you for the interesting insights on software craftsmanship. I just wanted to let you know that the youTube link for Gladwell has a typo, there shouldn’t be a backslash on the end of the url.

  2. gvb Says:

    September 26th, 2009 at 09:21 AM

    The second half of the session was an exercise in paired programming where two people were up front working on the hangman Ruby Sparring tournament live on the big screen. The twist was a four minute timer: every four minutes, one of the pair retired and a new person from the audience took his place.

    This was pretty fun and pretty intense for those who participated, but it took some of us (rolls eyes) a little bit to catch on to what was going on. For those of us from a non-TDD background, more introduction (perhaps Doug could have done one sequence himself, s.l.o.w.l.y) to illustrate the expected sequence of

    1. idea
    2. test (fails)
    3. implement
    4. test (passes)
    would have been helpful.

    About half the audience didn’t get sucked in, I suspect mostly due to not knowing Ruby. Knowledge of Ruby wasn’t a requirement because there was always a pair partner and plenty of advisers, but it is pretty intimidating to be on the hot seat without a Ruby background.


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