XPDay day 2

OpenSpace day today!

Always tough to decide which session to attend. I ended up in keith braithwaite’s session on the use of bayes’ theorem to prove if there are enough tests for a system.

It was quite heavy for me that early in the morning but was very interesting no less.
As I understand Keith wanted to put out this idea he has of using bayes theorem to calculate the probability that, given an initial probability that the code is correct, how much will additional tests prove that the code is correct.
What I liked about this was the idea that we could quantify our confidence that code is correct. however we did discuss that our initial assumptions could be incorrect and subject to second order ignorance. establishing the initial probability can also prompt more discussion between developers and QA.
I think Mike would have loved this discussion ;-)

Just finished a lighting talk session. one of the talks that stand out highlighted that many in the agile community have strong ethical values, yet work for companies that don’t have ethical goals…food for thought

XP Afternoon

So not quite a live blog, but here’s the lowdown so far.

After google’s keynote, there was a session by New Bamboo about practical agile tools.

* They constantly ask if there is a better way

* Use low tech solutions (Sword of integration made from rolled up newspaper)

* Scrum master task list, which looks like a handy way for someone to manage multiple agile projects

* Heatseeking actions – A good way to well define actions from retrospectives (we need to start doing more retrospectives “back home” and this is a good practice to follow)

Anna’s session on When Agile might not be the best solution provoked a lot of helpful debate. there will be a followup OpenSpace at somepoint. Lots of good feedback

After lunch there was another experience report coding dojo by Emmanuel Gaillot. I’ve picked up quite a few good tips from this and will be applying them when I start some internal dojos.

Finally there was a session by Gojko Adzic (still have to finish reading his book!) on Building software that matters. It’s good to hear that some of our practices with building user personas is something that loads of people are trying to do.

XP day is here

Just at the start if another XP day. Just had a keynote from google on how they have developed internal tools and infrastructure to run and gather statistics on test runs on all of their projects.
Some interesting points
* Google invest $100m on testing and have calculated that they have saved $160m – I wonder if this scales down.
* Goolge have 10,000 devs and each team manages their own releases which come from HEAD.
* They have used the statistics gathered to develop heuristics for good unit tests and intend to publish these at some point along with tools