Bombe at Bletchley Park © Bletchley Park

Details

Date: Tuesday 31st May 2011.

Time: 7:15pm start to a 9:15pm (doors open at 6:30pm and close with the pub).

Location: http://www.pieandale.com

Theme: Software Craftsmanship Round-up

Software Craftsmanship

The analogy of software development as a medieval style craft will romanticise our profession but it also provides a keen set of principles that will ensure software produced today will be used and evolved well into the future. The movement has been popularised by the likes of Uncle Bob Martin, Corey Haines, and, particularly in the UK, Jason Gorman. It is Jason Gorman that organises the Software Craftsmanship conference at Bletchley Park which is the main European conference on software craftsmanship. The attendance is limited to around 120 participants and demand always outstrips supply. This year though Agile Staffordshire will be represented by 8 members –  4 of which also attended last year.

A call to action by Jason Gorman at the end of last year’s conference urged us all to go out and spread the word about high quality, well tested, communicative code in well designed and usable software. This, coupled with the upcoming conference and the release of Uncle Bob’s follow up to Clean Code: The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers, means now is no better time to talk about software craftsmanship.

The Meeting

Software Craftsmanship 2011 is on Thursday 26th May and the plan for the Agile Staffordshire meeting the following week is to bring as much content and discussion as possible back up the M1 and across the A50 (and down the A34). This does mean that those involved will have to come up with something over the weekend so we don’t know yet what will be discussed. The programme for the day is available on the SC2011 web site so please take a look and let the group know what you’d like to know more about – some people already have which is great.

The format of SC2011 sessions are a mixture of programming, discussion and talks so we’ll probably have a mixture of topics at the meeting – bring a laptop as we’ll no doubt be writing some well crafted software.

I’ll not be organising this meeting from the end of this week as I’ll be on holiday. My able assistants Neil Kidd, Shaun Finglas and Paul Barrett are all on hand via the mailing list for any queries or suggestions.