Theme: Everything you wanted to know about coupling but were afraid to ask

Come along to hear a talk from Dr Kevin Rutherford (http://xpsurgery.com/about/) on Connascence.

Arrive from 6:30pm for usual drinks and spicy snacks.

Talks start 6:45pm followed by group discussion. Would be great if some of you would like to give a lightning talk too.

We'll head over to The Williams Ale & Cider pub afterwards.

Talk: Everything you wanted to know about coupling but were afraid to ask

TDD is the panacea of software development, the golden child of Extreme Programming. But there is a problem with test-driven development. A big problem. Everywhere I go, I see teams practicing TDD, and yet they are still creating horrible, smelly balls of mud. Code with many tests, and yet also many bugs. Code with many tests, but which cannot be refactored. How can that be possible?

The problem lies in the third step of the RED-GREEN-REFACTOR cycle. It's just too difficult!

In this talk we will explore a tool that can help us decide what to refactor and when. That tool is COUPLING (aka CONNASCENCE).

WARNING: Many of the slides in this talk will show code snippets.

Dr Kevin Rutherford (http://xpsurgery.com/about/) is a software development coach and extreme programmer working for the XP Surgery. He is the creator of the vastly under-rated Reek code smell detector, and the vastly over-rated book 'Refactoring in Ruby'. If you have ever used Unix System V or taken out a mortgage in the UK, you have unwittingly used his code. He now spends much of his time teaching and mentoring senior developers throughout the UK in software craftsmanship. He was using vi before you were born.