I arrived at the British Computer Society Configuration Management Group Conference earlier today. The conference is being held near Oxford this year at the rather plush Oxford Belfry hotel.

Danilo Beuche of pure-systems had already got here so we proceeded to set up the Software Acumen stand once I’d settled in.

As you’ll see some of the stand furniture we’ve been provided with is a little - let’s say - sturdy. So even though we have a fairly big stand space there’s not much room for us to move around. (Photo to follow)

After this we mingled. This involved some finger food, a number of drinks and a lot of chat. Later I caught up with Robert Cowham, CMSG President, who’s been organising the event. (Robert will be our SPA Cambridge speaker next month.) He’s just back from a conference in Las Vegas and seemed surprisingly lively given his probably jet-lag. Perhaps it’s all the adrenalin of running your own conference that’s keeping him going…

Tomorrow we’ll have a tool demo of pure::variants by Danilo. Wednesday I’ll give my talk on variant management. In between we’ll aim to have as many visitors as possible to our stand - provided they can see our Lilliputian figures among the giant stand furniture…

I’ve now received the feedback for my SPA 2007 Product Line Scoping session.

As I noted previously, James Robertson had some nice things to say about the session, but it seems he wasn’t the only one who got something from the session:

 ”I learned some useful stuff”, “Practical, engaging, helped me develop my thinking on some key areas” and  “Had value beyond narrow technical realm” were some of the written comments.

Overall the session came 11th out of 39 which is quite good given that I only had a couple of weeks to prepare the session after someone else dropped out.

Three of the participants rated it among their most successful sessions for the conference and the session rated 7.71 out of 10 overall (for comparison the best session scored 8.46 out of 10).

All in all a pretty good result.