Thursday, May 28, 2009

June Meeting – F#

It’s the first functional language to be included out of the box in Visual Studio. So what’s it all about? What can it do? and why should you care?

This month Mark Needham (@markhneedham) will give a run through of F# based on what he’s learnt through using it. Spread the word and we’ll see you on June 30th @ 6pm.


Edit: I originally wrote "dynamic" instead of "functional" when describing F#. Oops - my bad. I think I've been playing with too many new languages lately :-)

Thursday, May 21, 2009

May Meeting - BDD

According to Mike Cohn, the most critical risk facing most software development projects is the risk of developing the wrong product. He adds that on most projects this risk is entirely ignored.

Do you ever get the feeling, as the change requests start to mount up, that you have been developing the wrong product or wrong functionality?   That growing sense of frustration that the customer is making it up as they go, often at your expense?  All this despite detailed specs that everyone agreed to.

Over the past few years the idea of using customer facing tests as specification has started to slowly gain followers.  Terms such as BDD, TDD, DDD are popping up more frequently. However, judging by forum and blog postings there appears to be confusion in the developer world about how to apply these concepts and how much benefit they really provide.

Ernie Josefik will share some practical experience of applying these ideas over the past 3 years and demonstrate a recent real-world application of customer facing tests.

Bio

Over the past 23 years Ernie Josefik has

  • deleted 1000's of lines of code (and written a few more)
  • skydived into a rugby league grand final
  • run a successful software practice (Dataview Solutions)
  • slid on his back down an ice mountain (after losing his skis and stocks)
  • delivered functional and simple to use software on 4 continents
  • and partaken in numerous other foolish, exciting and terrifying activities

He now spends his time on the equally tough battles of getting his children to brush their teeth and helping frustrated business clients to comprehend the gaps in their software requirements specs.

 

As usual, please RSVP either via the facebook group, or by adding a comment to this post.  See you all there!