Details 

Golf Balls by walknboston

Date: Tuesday 28th February 2012

Time: 7:15pm start to 9:15pm .

Location: http://themorrismanpub.co.uk
Google Maps: http://g.co/maps/ptzt5

Theme: Practical Session

New Venue

Please note the new venue. It’s our first meeting at The Morrisman. Follow the links above for further information.

When I called in, the menu and food being served looked excellent. The beer was pretty good too.

Coding Golf

Shaun Finglas has kindly offered to run this months session. His proposal email was as follows:

My proposal is simply Code Golf. We’ll spend an hour (ish) solving a fairly trivial problem in the style of a kata as normal. The twist is you must then refactor your code to an extreme level so that you can solve the problem in the least amount of characters possible.

Rules:
– The code must compile/execute
– You can use any language you want as long as you can accept user input/display output – think simple console application
– The code must implement the required functionality

The challenge will be revealed on the night so there is no prerequisites apart from laptops. The more laptops we have the better. People can work solo/pair if they want but as long as we have enough machines we should be fine.

“Golfing” real life production code is not something you would want to do, but I’ve found Code Golf challenges very fun, and they show just what sort of merciless refactoring you can do once you have a good suite of tests to back you up. These sort of challenges are incredibly hard without a good suite of tests, so you can often win over people who maybe do not see the value in unit testing production code.

Lightning Talks

As yet (usual!) their are no volunteers for a lightning talk. If you have any topic you’d like to share with the group then you can have a 10 minute slot at the beginning of the meeting. Please email the group or mention it at the venue before we start.

Hope to see you there,
Neil Kidd

Intensive Air Flow © Paul Shannon 2010

Details

Date: Thursday 30th June

Time: 7:15pm start to a 9:15pm (doors open at 6:30pm and close after last orders).

Location: http://www.pieandale.com

Theme: Flow and F1 In Paediatric Intensive Care

Guest Speakers

For the first time in a few months we have not one but two guest speakers (rather than members’ contributions). Our guests are both internationally renowned speakers and doctors of their respective professions.

Flow – Dr. Kevin Rutherford

Kevin’s experience in the software development industry and wealth of knowledge on the subject of Agile and related topics makes him the finest Agile Coach for miles around. He will be demonstrating the theory of constraints and the benefits of concentrating on batch sizes using a simple dice game. This great way of illustrating how agile methods can improve the flow of your value stream and make your work life easier and simpler is not one to miss. I’d recommend that everyone at your organisation should attend this talk as it has relevance in all areas of business, and is a great way to convince senior management that agile methods can work in your organisation.

F1 In Paediatric Intensive Care – Dr. Harriet Shannon

In 2005 Harriet took up a post as research physiotherapist at the UCL Institute of Child Health to investigate respiratory physiotherapy techniques in intensive care at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.  Harriet’s PhD work focussed on the safety and efficacy of on-call physiotherapy treatments in intensive care and she is now a primary tutor for the MSc Course in Advanced Physiotherapy at UCL.

Harriet’s talk, “F1 In Paediatric Intensive Care: Reducing Bottlenecks in Time Critical Environments”, comes from a partnership created at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children between the intensive care teams and the pit crews of Formula One teams. Both environments require precision in preparation and planning with constant analysis of process speed and obstacles. The talk should give you a good insight into the observations and changes made in these time critical arenas, where a slow reaction could be a matter of life or death (and winning or losing).

Agile North

Following a successful presentation by Agile Staffs regulars Paul Shannon and Neil Kidd they managed to shamelessly plug the June meeting so it seems appropriate to point out the information for New Members to show any “North” converts everything they need to know to come and join in the Staffordshire Agile fun.

Details

Date: Monday 28th March

Time: 7:00pm start to a 9:00pm (although doors open at 6:30pm and close when the beer’s gone)

Location: http://www.pieandale.com

Theme: TDD Exercise and Designing A University Course on Agile

Test Driven Development Exercise

Following feedback in the last meeting’s retrospective it was noticed that TDD is a central part of adopting a set of agile practices. Continuous integration, refactoring and high standards of code quality are all achieved more effectively with a suite of unit tests, and code that has been written test first. While some of these practices can be adopted without TDD it is a useful tool for anyone attempting to try a more agile approach to software development.

We’ll be undertaking a short exercise where we test drive a String Templater class based on a similar exercise performed as a prepared kata by Software Craftsmanship Journeyman, Corey Haines. Participants will need a laptop and the ability to write and compile/interpret/run code. This exercise will be language agnostic so you can choose the language you use every day, something you’re experimenting with or something completely new – the only thing you will need is a unit testing framework. A good list of xUnit based TDD frameworks can be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unit_testing_frameworks

I use NUnit for C# which is very similar to JUnit for Java. PHPUnit is another similar framework but SimpleTest for PHP is also adequate. Ruby and Python are popular options but for ease of use you could use JSUnit or QUnit for JavaScript and just use a browser to run your tests. There are even TDD frameworks for database languages, functional languages and XSL.

We’re planning to take TDD from the beginning so please come along if you would like to learn some basic TDD. Also if you have experience and would like to help others to learn then come along too.

Designing A University Course on Agile

Trevor Adams, long time group member and university lecturer at Staffordshire University, will be preparing a discussion to focus on items that people working in software development think that universities could teach while also providing ideas for how this could be achieved. Hopefully this will explore the topic that has been a talking point at most meetings so far as the guys from the university are keen to get relevant agile content into their modules while local companies want graduates with agile experience. If you have ideas, experience or opinions then please drop in.