Emily Bache

The Software Craftsmanship movement has a manifesto (http:// manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/) which builds on the Agile manifesto. In practice it seems to be about encouraging developers to use Test Driven Development, Pair Programming, and other agile engineering practices. Enterprises often talk about the need for software quality, but donʼt seem to be prepared to embrace these kinds of practices because they are percieved as too expensive. In this fishbowl discussion weʼll be discussing our experiences working in enterprises and following the principles of software craftsmanship.

The discussion is open to everyone, but to get things going, some of the conference speakers have kindly agreed to sit in the fishbowl at the start and share their views on the matter.

How do you learn TDD? Well, a good start would be to come along to this session and try it out on a simple problem. If you wanted to learn Karate, you’d go along to a dojo every week and practice. The coding dojo is the equivalent for people who want to get better at coding. Learning in a group, in a safe practice arena, starting with simple exercises. We’ll be using the Randori form, which is a way for a group to code together, practise TDD, and collaboratively solve problems. Everyone should come prepared to write some code, some tests, and learn something.

What has theatre got to do with the work we do every day in our teams and organisations? Plenty, it turns out. We find in our work with and within teams, as coaches or as participants, the lessons of improv heighten our awareness of group and personal dynamics, enlarge our repertoires of behaviours and our capacity to influence, improve our collaborative skills and provoke us towards innovation. Not only has improv taught us many lessons about working together, fluency, behaviour, status, it’s also immense fun.  The session will be dynamic and participatory. We’ll alternate improv exercises and games with brief mini-retrospectives to unpack their meaning and relevance for our everyday work in teams. Oh – and though we’ll run the session in English, language is immaterial: in the games we’ll let people use any mutually intelligible and agreed-upon tongue! So please join us for 50 minutes of lively games and reflection.