Steve Freeman
Steve was a pioneer of Agile software development in the UK, he has built applications for banks, ISPs, financial data providers, and specialist software companies. He has given training courses in Europe, America, and Asia.
Previously, he worked in research labs, software houses, earned a PhD, and wrote shrink-wrap software for IBM. Steve also teaches in the Computer Science department at University College London. He is a presenter and organizer at international industry conferences, and was conference chair for the first London XpDay.
Track abstract - Room G1 - Developer effectiveness
Fractal TDD: Using tests to drive system design
We present our experience applying Test-Driven Development (TDD) at
all levels of the development process. TDD at the class level is now
well understood (if not always well practiced). We find that the
benefits we get from writing tests first and using them to drive
design apply at the system level too. That's why we try to address
integration and system testing as early as possible. The sooner the
system is in a deployable state, the better equipped we are to react
to changing business needs by delivering new features. Our experience
is that putting testing at the front of our development process, and
paying attention to what we learn from them, flushes out architectural
issues such as concurrency and distribution. The result is systems
that are easier both to maintain and to support. We can also avoid
some of common testing pitfalls, such as unreliability, slow
execution, and brittleness.
Track abstract - Room G1 - Developer effectiveness
Five years of change, no outages
Our team built a static data system for a leading investment bank. It
went into production about 5 years ago, since when it has grown
significantly and been through two generations of developer. It has
never failed in production. We followed XP as an approach with a
strong emphasis on driving features with acceptance tests.
Track abstract - Conversation Corner
Software Craftsmanship is too expensive for the Enterprise
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.
