The day started badly with a flat tyre and a hastily arranged taxi trip to Homerton…

I still managed to arrive before the start of registration at 08:00 where Andy, Louisa and Pete already had things well under-control at the registration desk.

Marina Haase was the first visitor to the desk and we went off an set up the projector / laptop and rearrange the chairs for her Creativity in Practice session. Marina had an impressive array of props for her participants to use so this took a little time for her to arrange but by the time of the plenary session things were in place.

The plenary went off smoothly and we broke up into quartets- these are small groups who meet throughout the conference to discuss what they’ve seen and heard through the day. It’s a good idea to have these groups, particularly if you haven’t been to the event before as you pick up new friends instantly and have people to talk to. My quartet included Rob Machin, Anthony Kesterton and Colin Barker - a good balance between people who had been to SPA conferences before and who were first-timers.

In the morning I went to Helen Sharp and Tracy Hall’s session on What Motivates Software Practitioners. Helen and Tracy are part of a research project that has been looking at this issue for about a year. Their main work so far has been to distill down the literature in this area and to build a model of what motivates practitioners.

For the purposes of this session the participants were divided into Developers, Project Managers, Mentors and Others. Unfortunately the Others table was full - this was SPA after all - so myself and another Other were surrogate Developers for the session.

Helen and Tracy had also provided a questionnaire which we completed as the session proceeded. This asked questions about self-motivation and will feed back into the research. I hope to get further results from Helen at a future date and will publish them here.

Some of the motivational factors raised included:

• Pride in doing a good job
• Autonomy
• Being part of a team of like-minded people
• Challenging work
• Variety
• Working with good people
• Working with the right tools
• Being able to improve things - code, processes

See the session outputs page for a full list of items discussed. There’s also more information available on the project web site.

After lunch I put more finishing touches to my Scoping Game session. When I ran the session at SPLC 2006 I’d had each team complete a score sheet but in order to minimize time this time around I built an Excel spreadsheet. Given my limited knowledge of Excel this took a little longer than expected…

Before dinner our quartet reconvened and we discussed the sessions we’d participated in. Of note was the Turning Up The Heat on Agile Projects session that introduced a framework for understanding issues and techniques for solving problems at the level of the team rather than of the individual.

I noted previously that SPA isn’t really fertile ground for model-driven development, but some of the speakers at the Code Generation 2007 conference I am organising are also present here.

Nick Rozanski and Eoin Woods led a session on Strategies and Patterns for Systems Continuity. The session outputs for this looked very interesting and the slides are available here. They’ll be leading a workshop called Designing a DSL for Information Systems Architecture at CG2007.

David Talby was also present and led a session on Lessons Learned from Scaling XP looking at lessons learned from the first large-scale project based on Extreme Programming methodology in the Israeli Air Force. David will be leading two sessions at CG2007: Enterprise-scale MDD and code generation: Challenges after the initial adoption and Model-Driven Testing: Growing your own solution.

The early-bird booking period for May’s BCS Configuration Management Group conference closes on 6th April. Save yourself £70 by booking by this date.

I will be giving a talk entitled Variant Management on Wednesday 16th May which will highlight some of the problems of Software Product Line development using a pure CM-based approach. However, there are a lot of other sessions of interest at the event.

See the full event programme for more information.

With 46 days to go, preparations for May’s Code Generation 2007 event continue apace.

I’ve been working on a number of interviews with session leaders to help promote the event and the first of these should be available on the Code Generation Network next week. There won’t be time to cover speaker before the event but these should also help give participants a better idea of which sessions to attend - depending on the speaker’s background and experience. The interviews will also be of general interest to the code generation community.

I’ve also been busy promoting the event more widely and this has paid off in terms of more bookings for the event - with last Monday being our best day ever in terms of bookings in a single day.

We’ve done a bit of work on tuning the event web site in the past couple of weeks - the most visible change being a consolidated speakers page - where all the speakers are listed and their experience described. This should help people navigate the programme more easily and also get a quicker idea of whether this is the event for them.

Finally, those of you who are regular readers will know that I spent part of last week helping behind the scenes at SPA 2007. This was partly to gain a better understanding of what to expect when it comes to this work at CG2007 and also to get a feel for how Andy Moorley - who will be managing the CG2007 event administration works. (He has lots of lists!)

Getting some behind the scenes experience like this has proved invaluable and I would recommend it to anyone thinking of organising their own event. Hopefully I also contributed to the success of SPA2007. There were no complaints about the generous portions of ‘champagne’ I poured at Tuesday’s tasting event

I did have a chance to speak to a number of people at SPA about CG2007 and have persuaded a few SPA regulars to be participants in CG2007. (We already had a number of SPA 2007 speakers as CG2007 speakers - myself included.)

I’m heading over to Oxford for the ACCU 2007 conference next week and expect to get similar levels of interest there.