A quick reminder that the booking fees for next month’s Code Generation 2009 conference in Cambridge increase by 10% next week.

This is to reduce our stress levels ahead of the event – knowing how many people will be coming to the event is very important If you don’t believe us – try organising a three day international conference yourself…

With just 4 weeks to go before this year’s Code Generation conference things are hotting up around here.

After seeing how successful the lightning talks were at this year’s ACCU conference we’ve decided to run some ourselves. The format will be a 10 minute session using only PDF slides – no demos. These will take place concurrently with the BoF sessions. More details will be available at the conference.

We’ve negotiated a few more partnership deals. BCS SPA members, Embedded Masterclass attendees, DSL Devcon attendees & Microsoft MVPs are now eligible for a 10% discount on conference fees. Thanks to these organisations for supporting the event.

Bookings seem to be conforming to last year’s pattern i.e. most people leaving it to the last minute to book rather than taking advantage of our generous early-bird offer. People seem to want this flexibility but it does mean they could miss out and they will end up booking at a higher rate. It certainly doesn’t make things easy for us as organisers; my hair is even greyer than last year. Please note that we’ll be increasing prices by 10% in June to reflect the added cost (and stress) for us of not knowing firm numbers until very late on. If you’re planning on coming get your booking in now

Accommodation at the college is now sold-out. But there are plenty of other options nearby so don’t panic! See http://www.codegeneration.net/cg2009/accommodation.php for options but don’t leave it too late – Cambridge is a popular destination and other accommodation options will also be filling up. Drop us a line (contact details here) if you’ve tried the listed options but still haven’t been able to find somewhere to stay. Unfortunately we don’t have any floor space to offer so do try and book up somewhere to stay sooner rather than later. Although it’s June Cambridge can get a bit cold in the evening so sleeping rough isn’t necessarily an option although we can provide a blanket and hot drinks if necessary

Peter Bell and Andrew Watson have been in touch and are putting the finishing touches to their panel sessions:  The State of the Art in Domain Specific Modeling & Migrating to Model-Driven Development. We expect to announce the panellists in the next week or so – Steve Cook (Microsoft) has confirmed for Peter’s panel. If you have any questions you want to be asked then you can either save them for the panels or let us know in advance and we’ll pass them on.

I’ve also been thinking about plans for our Tuesday night social event. It’s risky planning something outdoors here – even in June – but we’re going to try and go with our original plan of a punt trip along the stretch of river with the various historic colleges. This should be a great experience (assuming it’s not raining heavily) and will act as a good orientation for further exploration of the city. Should also be a great opportunity to get some photos online – MDSD specialists on (or in) the river or somesuch caption.

I’m personally looking forward to another great conference. Despite being ‘in charge’ I always have time to have fun and catch up with everyone. There’s rarely a dull moment…

May’s Software East event will have as its focus a talk by Joseph Pelrine, one of Europe’s leading experts on eXtreme Programming as well as Europe’s first certified ScrumMaster Practitioner and Trainer. The event will take place at Downing College, Cambridge on 21st May.

This session, titled Making Sense of Agile is relevant for anyone who leads and/or participates in Agile teams, but is aimed at practitioners looking for new and novel ways of removing impediments and adapting Agile processes in organizations.

Booking is now open for this event. Tickets (including light buffet) cost £15 if booked on or before 14th May. £20 thereafter.

Agenda

• 18:30 – 19:15: Registration, networking & light buffet
• 19:15 Welcome to Software East – Mark Dalgarno (Software Acumen)
• 19:15 – 20:30: Talk ‘Making Sense of Agile Development’
• 20:30 – 22:00: Networking

About Joseph Pelrine

Joseph Pelrine is C*O of MetaProg, a company devoted to increasing the quality of software and its development process. He has had a successful career as software developer, project manager and consultant, and has spoken about it at such diverse places as IBM, OOPSLA and the Chaos Computer Club. His work focus is on field of organizational complexity and its application to Agile processes.

Synopsis
People don’t make rational decisions – it’s not the way the brain evolved. Instead they make first fit (not best fit) pattern matches with prior experience (either their own, or others conveyed through stories) and then retrospectively justify them as “rational”.

This is no way to run a development effort (among other things).

This fact means that you either have to convey a new message in such a way that it “resonates” with an existing prior pattern of success, or disrupt those patterns so that people see things from a different perspective, with a disposition to act. The Cynefin (http://www.cynefin.net) multi-ontological sense-making framework provides an unbiased, pre-hypothetical basis for analyzing situations, issues and problems, and serves as a basis for discovering novel, oftentimes optimal solutions to them.

This talk will introduce parts of the Cynefin framework, drawing on a decade of theoretical research and practical experiments to work with the reality of human decision making, and will cover:

• Complex systems approaches to the forced evolution of systems – allowing applications to emerge from the interaction of objects with people and processes; avoiding end state design.
• New approaches to project management based on the ideas of social complexity, which legitimize formal, rapid and agile design methods within boundaries.
• Gaining senior management acceptance to radical ideas.
• The application of the Cynefin framework for problem-solving in the Agile domain.
• Understand Agile techniques by mapping them to the Cynefin sense-making framework.

As at previous Software East events there’ll be ample time both before and after the talk for networking and having a beer or two…

Manifestos have been all the rage in software development since the agile manifesto was launched in 2001.

Given the success of that manifesto, I felt it was time to put together my own manifesto to stop what I believe is one of the most serious problems in modern software development – copy-and-paste programming.

I launched my manifesto at the ACCU Conference in April and promoted it at Developer Day Scotland to great acclaim and general acceptance, so now is the time for a public launch.

Make a stand against copy-and-paste programming by adding your name in a comment here and by publicising the manifesto to your colleagues.

In order to get maximum consensus across the industry I have intentionally kept the manifesto brief:

With your help, we can stamp out this problem once and for all.

Dave Harvey and Pete Marks ran something a bit different at SPA 2009 last month.

The idea was that, working in groups, people would pitch the idea of using agile development methods to a group of industry veterans hand-picked for their ability to ask awkward questions.

In the scenario, each of the veterans worked for the same hypothetical big bank with a vision of ‘One Bank’ and each took the role of a senior exec – CEO John Nolan, COO John Daniels, CFO Dave Cleal & CTO Rob James.

Each of the four teams started by preparing an initial two minute  pitch based on two slides. This was then presented to one of the veterans who was given three minutes to probe our plans. This process was then repeated with a couple of the other veterans selected randomly. The veterans conferred while the teams updated the pitch for the next round.

At the end of three rounds the veterans had a ‘board meeting’ and our team emerged victorious, possibly helped by us having a few veterans of our own. We presented our pitch to the whole group and then as a whole we created some learning points from the whole session.

Here are the session outputs if you’re interested in more details (including photos).

This session is eminently plagiarisable so expect to see various ‘Pitching ???’ sessions coming from me in the future…

Since I’m in the Bristol area next week for the Embedded Masterclass I suggested that Monday 11th May might be a nice night for an ACCU South-West meet-up.

The plan is to meet at the Old India curry house around 18:30 – 19:00. Drop me a line if you’re coming so we can reserve a seat for you. Non-ACCU members welcome.

If you are planning oncoming to next month’s Code Generation conference it’s worth booking before the end of May since we’ll be adding a 10% surcharge on bookings in June.

Sorry, but it makes things much more cost-effective for us if people book just that little bit earlier than they might otherwise have done…