XP Practices: Refactorig, branching and merging. Joys and Pains.

At our next meeting (on the 9th of July at 7pm, in Victoria Hotel Pub) we are going to have a moderated debate about various specific eXtreme Programming practices, like refactoring, branching, merging, and possibly more...

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If you have any views on those or you have no views at all but would like to hear, what IT practitioners think of those, please come along.

We'll do our best to provide you with a drink and a snack.

Exploring Mobile Web Development

Chris Mills of Opera on Wednesday, the 11th of June at our usual place (Victoria Hotel Pub in Leeds), will deliver a presentation on the basics of mobile web development - what you need to think about in terms of device limitations, browser variance, and how you can look towards creating single web sites that will work well on both desktop and mobile browsers.

After the presentation we are staying in the pub to enjoy the networking and the odd glass of a beverage.

About the speaker:

Chris Mills is a developer relations manager for Opera - he edits and publishes articles on dev.opera.com and labs.opera.com, liaises with the community to raise awareness of Opera and collect feedback, and evangelises about Opera software wherever he can.

Find Chris' blog on My Opera.

Outside of work, he is an extremely avid music fan, enjoying playing and listening to a wide variety of music, including metal, folk, punk, electronica, prog, and more. His main band at the moment is the mighty - Conquest of Steel.

We'll do our best to provide you with a drink and a snack.

Change of Plans: Exploring Mobile Web Development

Unfortunately due to a bug circulating in and around Bradford, Chris Mills is unable to give us the talk tonight on Mobile Web Development. We are moving his talk to June, so now officially the talk on Mobile Web Development is going to happen on the 11th of June (second Wednesday as usual) at 7pm at the usual place - Victoria Hotel Pub.

Tonight instead of the talk, we are having a Computing Pub Quiz. The winning team of 4 will receive interesting prize(s), which we are still deciding on. Bring your clever friends, people with quirky computing knowledge spanning across decades, and you might find yourself winning some cool and geeky stuff.

Drinks are on us and fun is on everyone.

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Presentation moved to 11th of June:

Chris Mills of Opera will deliver a presentation on the basics of mobile web development - what you need to think about in terms of device limitations, browser variance, and how you can look towards creating single web sites that will work well on both desktop and mobile browsers.

After the presentation we are staying in the pub to enjoy the networking and the odd glass of a beverage.

About the speaker:

Chris Mills is a developer relations manager for Opera - he edits and publishes articles on dev.opera.com and labs.opera.com, liaises with the community to raise awareness of Opera and collect feedback, and evangelises about Opera software wherever he can.

Find Chris' blog on My Opera.

Outside of work, he is an extremely avid music fan, enjoying playing and listening to a wide variety of music, including metal, folk, punk, electronica, prog, and more. His main band at the moment is the mighty - Conquest of Steel

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We are also happy to announce that AGAIN we will be able to buy a pint of any drink from the bar for the first 25 people.

Next Meeting: The Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

On 9th of April (Wednesday as usual) at the Victoria Hotel Pub in Leeds at 7pm we are meeting to discus The Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering. There is no set agenda; we will just try to gently moderate the discussion, so that it revolves around the software industry topics.

The idea for the meeting came from this article on www.codinghorror.com

The article itself describes the book titled exactly The Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering.

You can treat the codinghorror article as a good prerequisite to the meeting.

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We are also happy to announce that we will be able to buy a pint of any drink from the bar for the first 25 people.

'Continuous Integration' webcast

Here is the Flash webcast of 'Continuous Integration' session I did a couple of weeks ago.

'Continuous Integration' cont.

After Richard's really good presentation in Bradford last Wednesday (screencast to be uploaded soon, so watch this space) and a really good networking session that spanned from Black Marble offices to The Fighting Cock I would like to keep the thread going. There were some really good thoughts floating by the glasses of cloudy ales that evening and maybe asking wider community and their experience with Continuous Integration will spread the knowledge even further. So please come forward and share your views.

I would like to post my thesis, just to bootstrap the thread:
Would it not be so much easier for everyone, if all tests had to run prior to committing any code into the source management. This would kill off (i.e. speed up) the following loop:

whack some code > run all tests (OR not) > commit > wait for CI to do the build > when green move on, when red come back to code and fix it OR move on and pretend it wasn't you

Such a barrier would put an imperative on every developer to fix all the issues with their code, before they could even dream of committing. It would also mean that the bad code would be fixed by the perpetrators, leading to better practices across the organization. It seams like one of those small changes to the system, that would make huge difference.

Any thoughts on that or anything related to CI, please write them up folks!

And below is Roy Osherove singing about this issue:

March 12th Meeting -'But it works on my PC' or Continuous Integration to improve quality

How many times have you heard the developer say "but it works on my PC" ?

How much time have you wasted trying to get a complex solution to build on a new PC?

In this presentation Richard Fennell will show how continuous integration, the automated building and testing of projects whenever files are checked in, can be used to improve the quality of any software development project. Helping to catch and resolve problems as soon as possible in the development cycle; not waiting until to delivery phase of a project to find there are integration problems.

The presentation will include demos of continuous integration using Cruise Control .NET and Visual Studio Team Server, as well as discussions of integration with other system such as NUnit, MSTest and Virtual Server

NOTE: This meeting is NOT a the usual location in Leeds, but at Black Marble's offices in Bradford, near the University.

Time 6:30pm for a 7pm start.
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