Things I learned at JAOO 2007

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  1. Martin Fowler may be one of the great minds of our engineering age, but his accent sounds a lot like MR. Bean. He's also not a great social figure and also sems to speak when spoken to. Eccentric.
  2. Robert C. Martin is a good Drummer. He played the drums for me while I was doing some of my songs at the first ever JAOO Jam Session.  He's also working on a new book called "Clean Code". I suggested he might want to take a look at Code Craft so that he has some differentiators from it. I still don't get why people call him uncle bob, but he says a friend of his called him that once and it stuck. From now on just call me Uncle Roy.
  3. Jim Coplien seems to bring out the worst in me. In his session about Scrum and Architecture he publicly denounced TDD and said (quoting) "TDD will deteriorate your architecture" and spoke loudly against using it. Him outspokenness seems to have hit me where it hurts because it led to a full hour of me and him going at each other outside the lecture hall with people gathering around as if it was a boxing match. The day after that I decided to go to the Open Spaces sessions at JAOO and open up a new topic called "TDD+Scrum=Good?". about 12 people showed up and Jim was one of them. For more than an hour we all exchanged ideas and some back and forth took place (lots of banter). I'll have a whole separate post about this discussion later on. The bottom line is - TDD can be misunderstood which can lead to people saying "don't use it" which can lead to people actually listening to this very bad advice which can lead to world chaos and the eventual death of the world. So don't listen to Jim.
  4. Mark Polack is a great guy to talk to and is the main driving force behind Spring.NET. Spring.NET is much more powerful than I initially thought. He's working hard on V 1.1 of that these days. He did a session on Spring.NET at JAOO. He doesn't blog enough. In fact, I can't even find his blog.
  5. Hamilton Verissimo is the main force behind the Castle Project and is a very smart and shy person. he also is a good listener and thinks twice before saying anything. I would love to talk to him more but I always fear I will say the wrong thing next to him (he feels so polite!). He's the opposite of the Israeli state of mind.
  6. The Danish crowed is just as quite and polite as the Tech-Ed Europe crowd or the DevDays Belgium Crowd.
  7. I really like the voting system on the sessions. As you leave you get the choice of taking a yellow, green or red note. you pick one and drop it in a big bucket as you leave the room. then they count the reds greens and yellows. very agile although I suspect they may be missing some important specific feedback this way.
  8. A Guitar that starts out with you as flight baggage will not necessarily find its way through 3 connection flights. It may arrive 3 days later as you prepare to leave back home.
  9. There are some great people at JAOO and I got to play with some of them at the JAM session. great idea!
  10. Free wi-fi in your hotel room will allow you to run utorrent so that when you leave back home you will have downloaded lots of nice TV shows to view on the place ride back home.
  11. Erlang is making a comeback. It's been there 20 years mainly used by the telecom industry for parallel high volume stuff. now it's the talk of the conference as the answer to multi-core and scalable application programming. I don't remember who told me this nice sentence but it went like this: "I guess its true what they say. Everything has already been invented 20 years ago". true.
Published Thursday, September 27, 2007 7:37 AM by RoyOsherove
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Comments

Thursday, September 27, 2007 1:22 PM by Steve Seymour

# re: Things I learned at JAOO 2007

Great post.  I would have loved to hear the "boxing match" between you and Jim. I let out an observable sigh every time I hear nonsense such as "TDD will deteriorate your architecture."  Such words are always said by someone that hasn't done the work to learn TDD.

Friday, September 28, 2007 3:17 AM by Martin Jul

# re: Things I learned at JAOO 2007

A great conference, indeed! I have written some notes about the TDD controversy here:

community.ative.dk/.../the-tdd-controversy-jaoo-2007.aspx

Saturday, September 29, 2007 7:36 AM by Sadek Drobi

# re: Things I learned at JAOO 2007

That's unfortunate, after this discussion to get such a conclusion. I've been there, and I thought you were convinced with the fact that Test Driven Development is a misleading term. And I thought that you agreed that there is nothing driven by the test. Rather you drive the tests! Just I find it a pity that you are telling half of the story. And that you are concluding by "don't listen to Coplien" after all the arguments he had!

Anyhow, I guess I’ll extend my blog post <a href='sadekdrobi.com/.../i-always-write-tests-before-code-but-i-don%e2%80%99t-do-test-driven-development'>I always write tests before code, but I don’t do Test Driven Development</a> to talk about this very discussion, and an excellent metaphor Jim mentioned.

Anyways, fortunately, and with the help of Floyd (InfoQ's Co-founder) I could arrange a debate with James Coplien and Bob Martin about this very topic. I guess it will appear at InfoQ sometime soon. And it is up to you to judge. There you'll get the full story, and you’ll know why I got upset reading "just don't listen to Jim"...

Saturday, September 29, 2007 8:09 AM by RoyOsherove

# re: Things I learned at JAOO 2007

Sadek: It was meant as a half ironic remark.

as I said I have a full blog post on this subject that has a more "balanced" look.

In the meantime, I do mean it to say "don't listen to him until you get the full picture"

Saturday, September 29, 2007 8:17 AM by Sadek Drobi

# re: Things I learned at JAOO 2007

well ok, now i prefer this one "don't listen to him until you get the full picture"

Saturday, October 06, 2007 5:25 AM by Jim Coplien

# re: Things I learned at JAOO 2007

Hi, Roy,

Just to help out your readership, and continuing in the rich vein of half-ironic remarks:

If they shouldn't listen to me, then who _should_ they listen to (I mean, besides you)?

Is there anyone else that we shouldn't listen to? I take it that your filtering criteria are along the lines of agreement with your position rather than on the basis of any rhetorical or dialectic principles?

There is only one case in which I advise people to not listen to someone: when they attempt censure. Let me then take this rare opportunity to exhort people to ignore your censure and to grab every perspective they can with both hands. The evidence for TDD is shaky and the evidence against it is growing (as in the two research papers I related at JaOO). We need industry dialog on this and I think that many have something to offer — even those whose objectivity we might call into question because they have a vested interest relating to their stake in writing a book on a related topic or something.

My position comes not from a vested interest but from broad experience applying TDD in software all the way back to the late 1980s at Bell Labs, and in hardware all the way back to the 1990s in Bell Labs and in a company called DAFCA (I'm not making this up) whose raison d'être can be viewed as supporting designers to do TDD-for-hardware.

So I won't be so foolish to say that to get the full picture, you should listen to me, but I do feel I have part of the picture. Like you, I'm willing to put my cards on the table. I'll let the reader judge the results for themselves, and prefer that to having someone else judge for them.

Tell you what: let's start getting that Agile conference together and let's bring some people together to sort this out in workshops, panels, and the like. I think it could be fun, and it would be good to pick up where we left off — and, as Sadek points out, to get to the other half of the story that seems to have vanished from your post.

Monday, October 08, 2007 9:49 PM by ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog

# The various meanings of TDD

Now that I'm having some real time to write something I thought I'd try to write down my thoughts starting

Tuesday, October 09, 2007 7:11 AM by Jim Coplien

# re: Things I learned at JAOO 2007

So far, I like the title :-) Go for it!

Thursday, October 11, 2007 7:59 AM by Anders Bengtsson

# re: Things I learned at JAOO 2007

Hi,

Thought you'd like this photo from the hall debate: www.flickr.com/.../1438966887

:)