[JHB] NoDB system development , 10 things I hate about you, Value for tests?

· Welcome (start 16h30)

· Lightning talk (start 16h35) - 10min - Dries Cronje

· Session 1 (start 16h50) - 20 min - Louise Perold

· Session 2 (start 17h15) - 40min - Joshua Lewis

Title: NoDB system development - what we've learned

Facilitator: Dries Cronje

By taking the traditional way of thinking about system architecture with a DB somewhere central to the design, and ditch the DB altogether forced us into a new direction, a direction that we couldn't have imagined in our wildest dreams...

Dries is a Systems architect for Newsclip Media Monitoring, who takes ideas and turns it into reality, loves mentoring the talented, and has a keen interest in Computation Intelligence, Deep Learning and DevOps processes. Dries started he's career in 2005 as a C# developer and has worked on a wide range of projects ranging from Vehicle Tracking, asset management, GIS/Logistics systems all the way to Media Monitoring where he has a lot of fun doing language processing, 'OCRing', audio recognition and computer vision on a large amount of data in the media.

Title: 10 things I hate about you… (Reasons why I love our Developers)

Facilitator: Louise Perold

Louise is a passionate context-driven tester who has been consulting in the Financial Services industry in Johannesburg, South Africa for over 14 years. She is currently managing a team (of super testers) at Rand Merchant Bank. The journey to learn more and test better (in context) has taken her to 6 CAST conferences, 3 Let’s Test conferences and Problem Solving Leadership (with Jerry Weinberg). Last year, she organised the first Tasting Let’s Test conference in Joburg. She is also founder and co-organiser of the Joburg Software Testers Meetup group. Louise is on twitter @lperold

Title: Are you getting value from your tests?

Facilitator: Joshua Lewis

There is a lot of dogma surrounding automated tests, whether they're unit, developer, integration or system tests. Experience has shown that certain kinds of tests are valuable at different points in the life of a software system, and can even become harmful. In this talk I'd like to question some of the dogma and share my experiences around writing automated tests.

Joshua Lewis has been a developer in SA for 10 years. He holds an MEng from Wits. He currently works at DStv Digital Media as a Software Developer Coach and lectures post-grads at Wits part-time.

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