July 2013 – Planning

July 18, 2013 Agile / Aliens / Meeting
No comments
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
2 comments
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
1 comment
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.

April 2013 – Ruby on Rails!

April 21, 2013 Software Craftsmanship
5 comments
Ruby on Rails logo, on Flickr

Ruby on Rails logo by KSEltar (Wikimedia)

Date: Thursday 25th April 2013

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

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

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is a mature and well used web application framework. It’s ubiquity in startup culture has made it popular through its tool support and quick development support. However, it’s also received criticism on several fronts in terms of code quality, framework coupling and slow executing tests.

This session run by Paul Williams aims to debunk a few myths whilst presenting Ruby on Rails including:

  1. Demonstrating the original ‘Scaffolding’ approach to Rails
  2. Demonstrating a BDD approach to Rails development through Cucumber
  3. A discussion on some of the criticisms of Rails

This session is hands on, and a VirtualBox Ubuntu environment will be provided via USB stick. If you want to get your hands dirty, please install VirtualBox before the session – it’s free!!

Also, please note venue change. As many will know, we’ve had venue problems over the recent months, and we have provisionally booked a room at Stafford Campus – this will be confirmed as soon as possible, and broadcast on the Newsgroup.

Hope to see you there,

Paul.

February 2013 – Aliens Kickoff!

February 19, 2013 Agile / Aliens / Meeting
No comments
Alien Faces Vector Image by Vectorportal, on Flickr

Alien Faces Vector Image by Vectorportal

Date: Thursday 28th February 2013

Time: 7:30pm start

Venue: The Stafford Ale House

Location: Google Maps

Alien Invasion Kickoff

This month we will get started on the Alien Invasion project.

The main repository can be found at https://github.com/agilestaffordshire/Alien-Invasion-Coding-Challenge .
To work on the code, begin by forking the repo in your own account and work from there.
Rob Stothard has been added as a collaborator. Ideally at least one more person would be useful. Let me know if you would like to step forward.

Rob has kindly configured and hosted a TeamCity instance. A DNS record has been configured to point to http://teamcity.agilestaffordshire.org. TeamCity is currently configured to watch the Github repository and build on commit.

The site is hosted at http://www.kidd.org.uk/AlienInvasion/. I am currently trying to get a cname of  http://aliens.agilestaffordshire.org working but am experiencing problems. I have contacted the hosting company to see what can be done.

For task management, an AgileStafforshire organisation has been set up at trello. So please set up an account and pass on your account name or email address to be added to the group.

Outline Agenda

  • Code review – It would be useful to familiarise yourself with the code before the meeting
  • Characterisation tests – Can we wrap the existing code in tests to avoid regressions?
  • Add ported code from SqlServer to MySql – The code already exists and just needs committing
  • Definition of initial goals – Where to begin and where do we want to go?

Hope to see you there,
Neil.

January 2013 – Refactoring legacy code

January 13, 2013 Kata / Refactoring / Software Craftsmanship
No comments
A little evening refactoring by joe.oconnell

A little evening refactoring by joe.oconnell

Date: Thursday 31st January 2013

Time: 7:30pm start

Venue: The Stafford Ale House

Location: Google Maps

Why Refactoring?

Well, a Happy New Year to one and all! Over the last few sessions, we’ve discussed The Alien Invasion project muted for 2013 – this project aims to change the implementation of the original Alien Invasion Challenge to support language agnostic clients. This will require reworking of ‘legacy code’ defined by Michael Feathers as ‘code without tests’.

To support this project, Paul Williams, suggested that we start 2013 with a smaller challenge to equip the group with the skills and some experience in wrapping legacy code in tests. This will then allow refactoring to be applied safely, without worry that functionality will be regressed…

The challenge

This challenge focuses on a legacy C# component with an automated build script but no unit or integration tests. During the evening, we will progressively get the code under test, at which point we will be able to change the functionality through normal TDD refactoring.

To ensure we all get equal input into the session and encourage communication and shared learning, the session shall be in the Randori Session Format – a first for Agile Staffs? This format also has the advantage of only one development machine being used, and thus there are no software or setup prerequisites for the session. The session will however use Visual Studio 2010 and Resharper to drive unit Tests using NUnit so any exposure of these would be advantageous but not required.

Edited…

The code is available on GitHub and the presentation on Paul’s website. The code will be pushed back at the end of the session for reference. This will also provide the group with exposure to Github to be used for the Alien Invasion.

 

December 2012 – XPDay Lightning Talks

December 3, 2012 Agile / Meeting
1 comment
christmas decorations

Christmas decorations by Vanessa Pike-Russell, on Flickr

Date: Thursday 13th December2012

Time: 7:30pm start

Venue: The Stafford Ale House

Location: Google Maps

Social

We have not planned a particular theme for this meeting – simply a lightning talk and a good social event.

XPDay 2012 Lightning Talk

Last month Paul Williams kindly offered to give a lightning talk covering his ( and Neil’s ) attendance at the XPDay 2012 conference. As we had a busy evening planned with Ashley’s excellent Kanban introduction workshop, Paul kindly agreed to move his lightning talk to start of this months meeting.

Christmas Menu

Ann, from The Stafford Ale House , has kindly passed on their Christmas menu. To ensure that she has sufficient stocks for our orders she asks that we pre-order on the Sunday prior. (9th December). Note that it is not absolutely necessary to pre-order. Please see the menu below and lookout for the specific google groups thread to get your order in.

 

Hope to see you there

Neil

November 2012 – Kanban Introduction

November 11, 2012 Agile / Kanban / Meeting / Software Craftsmanship
1 comment
Simple-kanban-board-

Simple kanban board via Wikimedia Commons

Date: Thursday 29th November 2012

Time: 7:30pm start

Venue: The Stafford Ale House

Location: Google Maps

Introduction To Kanban

At last months meeting, due to technical problems, we didn’t get round to the Minisculus Challenge. However we did discuss the idea of extending the Alien Invasion project.

The catalyst of this project is that back in  June one of the ideas was that we should work on a project together. When we first tried the Alien Invasion we found that, due to a dependency on a client side library, participants were constrained to a .net implementation. In the discussion following there was a consensus that it would have been better for the clients to be language agnostic.

The intended outcomes of the project are:

  • To refactor the code so that it can be used via any web enabled language.
  • To act as the catalyst for discussions at our monthly sessions

It was agreed that Kanban would probably be a good fit for our project management needs, as it doesn’t specify fixed iterations. Additionally a number of the group, while being aware, have not used Kanban “in anger” so it was decided that this months session would be an introduction Kanban.

By happy coincidence Ash Moran is running a getKanban session at madlab in Manchester on the 24th November.  I’m very pleased to say that Ash has agreed to come in and run the “short” game play session for us. I will be going to the Saturday MadLab session and at the time time of writing there are still places available, join us if you can.

 

Hope to see you there

Neil

October 2012 – Minisculus

October 21, 2012 Agile
1 comment
Creative commons

An Enigma Rotor Courtesy of http://commons.wikimedia.org

Date: Thursday 25th October 2012

Time: 7:30pm start

Venue: The Stafford Ale House

Location: Google Maps

Minisculus Challenge

The Minisculus Challenge is a web based programming challenge originally written for the Software Craftsmanship 2010 meetup. This is great fun and pretty addictive.

I won’t write too much about it as all the info is at the site linked above. In short you need to program JSON restful requests against a web based service to obtain questions and submit results. It is language agnostic so bring along your laptops and favoured envronment. We will organise the structure of the challenge on the evening.

 

Alien Invasion

Some time back, Paul Williams ran a session where we programmed against a web API. The code for the project was originally written as a test bed for a tool called NCrunch. The upshot of this is that the client section of the software is a .net dll. A number of session attendees raised the point that the .net dependency was a pain and it would be better to be language agnostic. In our ideas session we have listed “lets do a project together” – well here is an idea. We can refactor the alien invasion code to be all server side and maybe restful.

Paul Williams has offered to put together a few slides. We can then discuss the project, with a view to development practices, infrastructure and so on. Bring your ideas.

 

See you there

Neil

September 2012 – Anagram Follow Up

September 19, 2012 Agile / Kata / Meeting
1 comment

Date: Wednesday 26 September 2012

Time: 19:30 start.

Venue: The Stafford Ale House
Location: Google Map

It’s a follow up session! Bring your laptops and other programming apparatus. Last month we had a great session with the Anagram Kata. This month, we shall follow up with some interesting turns involving the same Kata. We shall assume the roles of developers that have happened across some code regarding Kata and have acquired responsibility of maintenance.

Trade your solutions from last month for a piece of code that you have not seen. There’s plenty of implementations in various languages in the comments section of our August post (Objective-C, Java, C#, Python and PHP amongst others). If you have attempted the kata then I encourage you to share your code for some variety. Adapt the code using one or more of the following scenarios:

  1. The code is used in a neat widget in an unspecified number of ways. You’ve been tasked with making the code extensible and adaptable to change. Refactor an existing code to achieve the goal.
  2. Adapt the algorithm employed in the existing code to perform ‘better’ in terms of time and/or space. How will you measure this? Can you cache results to improve anagram generation time for subsequent requests of identical input?
  3. If your acquired code has no formal testing applied to it, how can you be sure that it works? Create a suite of tests. What tests are required to assure required functionality in any dictionary?

Continue reading →

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →

Tag Cloud

2015 agile announcement clean code codeweavers conference data development experience experiences february git guildedrose january kanban kata lean lego lego mindstorms march meeting ODI open data outcomes presentation programming REST retrospective software software craftsmanship staffordshire Stuart Harrison tdd university value version control