Talk: Dan North - Software Faster (Open to all)

We will be welcoming Dan North to campus. Dan will be giving an introductory talk (open to all) followed by an in-depth workshop.

The workshop is open to staff of Elixir nodes only including EBI. You can register for the workshop separately here (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/training/events/2016/software-faster-months-minutes):

http://photos2.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/d/7/8/3/600_452275171.jpeg

Dan is the originator of Behaviour-Driven Development, an agile approach to software development that encourages teams to deliver the software that matters by emphasising the interactions between stakeholders. He also proposed Deliberate Discovery, which challenges assumptions around software planning and estimation. He argues that there are no best practices and that everything we do is subject to opportunity cost.

Abstract:

Some teams are orders of magnitude more effective than others. Kent Beck famously described himself as "not a great programmer, but a good programmer with great habits". For the last few years Dan North has been working with, and observing, some very good teams with quite exceptional - and rather surprising - habits.

Are katas the best way to learn a new language? Is manual testing a waste of time? Is copy-and-paste always evil? Is the customer always right? In this talk Dan introduces the idea of delivery patterns - patterns of effective behaviour in delivery teams - and describes some of the more unusual but effective patterns he's been collecting. These are not patterns for beginners, but then again, Dan argues that patterns aren't for beginners anyway.