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Review: Brooklyn Beta and Maintainable C

December 2, 2013 Agile / Meeting
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Brooklyn Beta

A big thank you  to Trevor for sharing his brilliant talk on experiences at Brooklyn Beta earlier this year, which focused on web platforms delivering. It is really encouraging to see the move towards organisations exposing data allowing the creation of business that can deliver the real value of that data by matching the needs of those in the community. The event is highly recommended with further details on Trevor’s Blog, so if your interested in attending next year, watch out for details here  – https://brooklynbeta.org/

Maintainable C

We then moved onto Trevor’s C code used for stenography and discussed how it can be tested. The ideas presented for testing involved simple regression tests to ensure it was functionally working using shell scripts, then work on breaking down the single function into logical methods/applications that are effectively unit tested. You can contribute to the project at Trevor’s repository.

 

I’ll be sure to get a link up for the slides from Trevor shortly.

It was good to see new faces, and thanks to everyone for attending.

Next Month

The provisional date for next month is 17th December at Morris Man for the annual Agile Staffordshire Christmas Meal.

Jon

November 2013 – Brooklyn Beta and Testing with C

November 17, 2013 Agile / Experiences / Kata / Meeting / Software Craftsmanship
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Date: Thursday 28th November 2013
Time: 7:00pm
Venue: Staffordshire University – Stafford Campus (K102 – the Octagon building)

Brooklyn Beta is a friendly web conference aimed at the “work hard and be nice to people” crowd. Trevor Adams, a long time member of Agile Staffordshire, attended the event and will be presenting a short talk on what happened and what it might mean. The fourth Brooklyn Beta happened during 9-11th October 2013 in Brooklyn, New York.

Later in the session we shall be refactoring some C code; an exercise that grew from a post-presentation discussion in October. To get the most out of the session, access to a C compiler will be useful. The code is available via a github repository.

Last month’s agile experience session with Craig Judson

November 14, 2013 Agile / Experiences / Meeting
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Firstly, I’d like to thank Craig for an excellent October session on Codeweaver’s experiences with agile. It was our first session in a Staffordshire University lecture theatre so well done Craig for dealing with such an imposing stage, especially with the growing number of attendees 🙂

It was good to see this increase in newcomers and regulars – surely due to the combination of the interesting presentation, Cathy’s excellent work on publicising our group around the University and the Meetup.com site attracting newcomers.

Back to Craig’s talk (Development in an Agile Environment -slides) – he briefly covered the Chaos to Kanban era at Codeweavers which saw their development team and wider organisation transistion towards Lean service provision. Craig discussed their popular introduction to agile through Scrum, how using an agile coach (Kevin Rutherford) helped, and how agile means change to all stakeholders within an organisation. In particular, he introduced many to concepts like ‘work in progress’, ‘flow’, ‘feature switches’ and ‘SOLID principles’ which fuelled a healthy barrage of questions at the end.

9PM came too quickly, and the questions had to be interrupted temporarily while we walked / drove to  the Morris Man pub. On completion of the traditional ale purchasing, the questions and discussions continued for some time – another great Agile Staffs session.

 

 

October 2013 – Agile Experience Guest Speaker

October 13, 2013 Agile / Kanban / Meeting / Scrum
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Go to Codeweavers

Date: Wednesday 30th October 2013
Time: 7:00pm
Venue: Staffordshire University – Stafford Campus (Lecture Theatre 2 – the Octagon building)

This month we welcome Mr Craig Judson from Codeweavers Limited. Codeweavers are a local company, based just outside Stafford in Dunston. They adopted agile techniques in 2007, starting with Scrum and have continued to evolve their agile techniques ever since.

Following graduation from Staffordshire University School of Computing, in 2006, Craig joined Codeweavers as a developer and has since progressed to become an Operations manager. He has previously spoken at international conferences and BCS meetings.

Craig’s talk will discuss how Codeweavers have adapted agile techniques to fit their requirements. A taste of the topics covered are:

  • OO and behaviour
  • Code smells and ‘if’ statements
  • Continuous Integration and Source Control
  • Pair Programming and the Pragmatic Programer
  • Kanban and Single Piece Flow
  • University is only the first step!

As I’m sure you’ll agree, some of the topics could be controversial! Come along and see a hands on report.

Hope to see you there,
Neil

September 2013 – Retrospective

October 10, 2013 Agile / Meeting / Retrospectives / Software Craftsmanship
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Click for full size

Mind Map (click for full size)

Following some discussion on the Google Groups, and offline, we decided to do an ad-hoc group retrospective during Septembers meet up. We didn’t follow the normal retro questions – what’s gone well, what can be improved etc.

Rather, we brainstormed future session ideas, tabled the possibility of changing venues. We’ve been challenged on how to attract new members and speakers and pondered the symbiotic relationships between them.

We’re currently moving all the great ideas from a mind map into two Trello hosted kanban boards. The key areas discovered were future sessions and marketing – you will find a board for each area. If you would like to contribute to the boards, simply let myself or Neil know your Trello username and you’ll be added.

In particular, we’re moving back to basics with subject matter – more TDD, more pairing. In particular, more sessions on experiences – how agile does / doesn’t work. However learning evolves etc. Also, more lightning talks etc to promote collaboration and introducing new ideas.

As a tactical move to promote Agile Staffordshire at other community events, Neil and myself are sorting t-shirts to wear at Software Craftsmanship. Neil – order me a large!!

Finally we plan to get blog posts out earlier, with a session follow up post each month followed soon after by a post promoting the next session. We need to increase the volume and always welcome new members.

Regards,
Paul

September 2013 – First Contact

September 23, 2013 Agile / Aliens
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First Contact

First Contact

Date: Thursday 26th September 2013

Time: 7:00pm

Venue: Staffordshire University – Stafford Campus (K106 – the Octagon building)

 

Last month we continued our discussions and began creating the RESTful implementation of our alien invasion game with the creation of the game controller.

Continuing with getting the minimal feature set completed, this month we look to address the missing features to move us towards our first RESTful client integration.  The server needs to respond to requests for a wave and generate responses to a defence strategy. Once the simple implementation of London is working, we can then look towards multiple stages, persistent weapons states and teams.

Hope to see you there,
Jonathan

August 2013 – Some RESTful coding

August 27, 2013 Agile / Aliens
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Date: Thursday 29th August 2013

Time: 7:00pm

Venue: Staffordshire University – Stafford Campus (K106 – the Octagon building)

Following my brief refresher on REST and HTTP verbs, the group started to collaborate on a API designs that would allow Alien Invasion to present a language agnostic interface. Whilst much of this API would be fairly straightforward, the group thought that a couple of coding spikes would be useful to cement ideas, and ensure the approach both works and is easy to understand.

With these validation spikes in mind, August’s meeting on Thursday aims to focus on some coding so bring your laptops, Visual Studios, and fast fingers for a play with REST. We might even get to commit some code back to GitHub!

Hope to see you there,
Paul.

July 2013 – Planning

July 18, 2013 Agile / Aliens / Meeting
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Planning - found via http://search.creativecommons.org/ with google images

Make a plan

Date: Thursday 25th July 2013

Time: 7:00pm

Venue: Staffordshire University – Stafford Campus (K106 – the Octagon building)

 
 
 

After gaining familiarity with the game in last months game play we will make a high level plan (read: just enough planning) of the approach we will take to make the game server side.

We will aim to get the first functionality out to the customer – a minimal marketable feature.

  • What will that be?
  • The best way to achieve it?
  • Bring your ideas and let’s get busy

If you haven’t had chance yet, be sure to read the REST resources that Paul Williams linked to in his recent group post.
 
Hope to see you there,
Neil.

June 2013 – Alien Invasion Replay

June 23, 2013 Agile / Aliens / Refactoring
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Alien Faces Vector Image by Vectorportal, on Flickr Re-coloured

Alien Faces Vector Image by Vectorportal

Date: Thursday 27th June 2013

Time: 7:00pm start (Please note time change)

Venue: Staffordshire University – Stafford Campus (K102 – the Octagon building)

Following last months session kicking off the Alien Invasion refactoring process, we discovered that a deeper and fresher understanding of the gameplay and strategies to defend earth would hopefully lead to a quicker and improved refactoring. After further discussion, we decided the best way to learn the problem domain would be to play the game again. Therefore, June’s session will be to have another go at Alien Invasion; a chance to kick some Alien Butt whilst trying to think how REST or other paradigms could be used to allow the kata to become language agnostic.

We have a live server running, so the pre-requisites for the session will be VS2010, an Nunit compliant test running (NUnit-console, Resharper, NCrunch or others). The distributable game component will be provided on a USB stick.

May 2013 – Back To The Aliens (Take Two)

May 13, 2013 Agile / Aliens / Kanban / Meeting
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Alien Faces Vector Image by Vectorportal, on Flickr Re-coloured

Alien Faces Vector Image by Vectorportal

Date: Thursday 23rd May 2013

Time: 7:00pm start (Please note time change)

Venue: Staffordshire University – Stafford Campus (K102 – the Octagon building)

 

 

This month we will (finally) kick-off the Alien Invasion project.

Code Repository

The repository is a GIT repository and can be found at https://github.com/agilestaffordshire/Alien-Invasion-Coding-Challenge .

To work on the code, begin by forking the repo and checking it out to your local machine.

If your are not familiar with GIT there are some excellent resources at the GIT documentation pages, GitHub and  a number of courses at Code School.

Live Hosting

The site is now hosted at http://aliens.agilestaffordshire.org

Task Management

An AgileStafforshire organisation has been set up at trello. Please set up an account and pass on your account name or email address to be added to the group.

Outline Agenda

  • Definition of initial goals – Where to begin and where do we want to go?
  • Code review – It would be useful to familiarise yourself with the code before the meeting.
  • Characterisation tests – Can \ should we wrap the existing code in tests to avoid regressions?

Hope to see you there,
Neil.

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