KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
OPENING KEYNOTE SPEAKER (24th Feb):
The Technologist’s Guide to Hitchhiking
Seb Rose
(@Sebrose)
Are you assessed according to the professional development plan you submitted at last year’s appraisal? Where will you be in five year’s time? Have you ever been hitchhiking?
While it’s important to acquire relevant knowledge and skills to further your career, it’s also useful to occasionally reflect on the role that serendipity plays in all our lives. I’m not talking about loosely thought out escapist dreams or delegating your career to a higher power. The best professionals and business people are those that are able to take advantage of opportunities when they arise – something that observers often characterise as luck. If it is luck then, to some extent, we make our own luck.
You may be wondering where hitchhiking comes into this. In part, it’s through the long relationship that technologists have had with the work of Douglas Adams and the number 42. Hitchhiking is also a good metaphor for the development of a career in technology, incorporating all the elements of forecasting and preparation, but combining them with massive unpredictability.
I’ll draw on over 30 years of software development (and hitchhiking) to encourage you to both loosen up and apply yourself.
About Seb
Consultant, coach, designer, analyst and developer for over 30 years. Seb has been involved in the full development lifecycle with experience that ranges from Architecture to Support, from BASIC to Ruby. Recently he has been helping teams adopt and refine their agile practices, with a particular focus on collaboration and automated testing.
Seb is the lead author of “The Cucumber for Java Book” (Pragmatic Programmers) and a contributing author to “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know” (O’Reilly). He has written for many online journals, including Agile Connection, Simple Talk and the Prose Garden. He has spoken at dozens of UK and international conferences, including Software Architect (London), XP (Vienna & Rome), Agile 2014 (Orlando), Java One (San Francisco), NDC (Oslo), Agile Testing Days (Potsdam) and Eurostar (Maastricht).
ELITE SPONSOR UEA CompSci PRESENTATION (24th Feb):
Gerard Parr, Head of UEA CompSci
(@UEA_Computing)
CLOSING KEYNOTE SPEAKER (24th Feb):
Are you ready for the coming revolution?
Russel Winder
UK school curriculum underwent a revolution as of 2014-09: ITC was replaced with programming (aka computer science). Whilst the change itself was campaigned for, and widely wanted, the way government handled the change left a lot to be desired. Some, but not all, universities and colleges have joined in realizing the change and preparing for the consequent revolution in university computer science curriculum, c.2018 onwards. Are businesses ready for the knock-on change?
This presentation will delve into some of the most important and/or obvious issues surrounding this world leading experiment in child education.
Ex-academic, Analyst & consultant Russel talks about the important issues surrounding the government’s push for programming in UK schools, and how the way it’s been handled has left a lot to be desired.
From 2015 ICT in UK schools is to be replaced with programming, but the way the government handled the change left a lot to be desired. Russel talks about some of the most important and obvious issues surrounding this world leading experiment in child education.
About Russel
Ex-theoretical physicist, ex-UNIX system programmer, ex-academic. Now an independent consultant, analyst, author, expert witness and trainer. Also doing startups. Interested in all things parallel and concurrent. And build.
Actively involved with Groovy, GPars, GroovyFX, SCons, Me TV, and GStreamer. Also Gradle, Ceylon, Kotlin, D, Go, and bit of Rust. And lots of Python, especially Python-CSP.
SATURDAY KEYNOTE SPEAKER (25th Feb):
From Coda to Code: The SupaPass Journey
Juliana Meyer
(@julianameyer)
Join us to discover the tech startup story, that began from a bedroom in Norwich with a vision for a more efficient rewarding future for creatives, and has led to a globally recognised tech platform working with artists from major record labels.
About Juliana
Juliana Meyer is Founder and CEO of SupaPass, the fair-trade music streaming app. SupaPass gives anyone with a fanbase their own subscription streaming service. Fans subscribe to a specific creator’s channel from £1 per month and creators earn up to 100% net revenue share of their fan subscriptions.
Juliana founded SupaPass to give efficient, fair, transparent revenue from streaming for artists, labels and publishers. Working with global artists like Grammy Award-winning Imogen Heap, SupaPass is exploring cutting edge technology including Blockchain.
Prior to founding SupaPass, Juliana Meyer ran her own label and was an award-winning singer-songwriter, including writing Norfolk’s Official Olympic Song for the 2012 Olympics. She also has a Masters Engineering Degree from Oxford University. One of the first steps in founding SupaPass was co-founding SyncNorwich in order to find and build the team.
SCHOOL FOCUSSED DAY SATURDAY KEYNOTE SPEAKER (23rd Feb):
“Whoops”, and other classic programming phases
Dom Davis
(@Idomdavis)
Schools now teach algorithms and programming from the age of 5, so it’s hardly rocket science. Except when it is. And even when it isn’t it goes wrong a lot. I should know, I’ve been responsible for some of that wrongness. The trick is to learn from your mistakes, and to make sure that when it goes wrong, it does so in a way that no one will notice, and definitely not in the ways I’m going to spend this session talking about.
About Dom
Dom Davis is a veteran of The City and a casualty of The Financial Crisis. Not content with bringing the world to its knees he then went off to help break the internet before winding up in Norfolk where he is now CTO and technology evangelist at a rapidly growing startup. Dom is an enthusiastic and impassioned speaker [read: he gabbles] who uses a blend of irreverent sarcasm and flippant humour to bring complex subjects to a broad audience. Whether or not they understand him is up for debate, but he likes to believe they do.
TECH TRACK
Get Kata
Kevlin Henney
(@KevlinHenney)
Coding katas are a way that programmers can kick the tires of their programming languages, paradigms and practices. Typically anchored in a TDD cycle, katas are typically simple problems that give programmers the opportunity to exercise deliberate practice and explore different approaches, whether programming style, pair programming or test-first programming. But the simplicity can be deceptive, with many programmers tiring of these katas too soon, missing out on some of the more mind-bending and paradigm-expanding opportunities on offer. This session will pick on a couple of katas and dig deeper into TDD, lambdas, language(s), (dys)functional programming and Alcubierre drive.
Clean Coders Hate What Happens To Your Code When You Use These Enterprise Programming Tricks
It is all too easy to dismiss problematic codebases on some nebulous idea of bad practice or bad programmers. Poor code, however, is rarely arbitrary and random in its structure or formulation. Systems of code, well or poorly structured, emerge from systems of practice, whether effective or ineffective. To improve code quality, it makes more sense to pick apart the specific practices and see their interplay — the cause — than to simply focus on the code itself — the effect.
This talk looks at how a handful of coding habits, design practices and assumptions can systematically balloon code and compound its accidental complexity.
About Kevlin
Kevlin is an independent consultant, trainer, reviewer and writer based in the UK. His development interests are in patterns, programming, practice and process. He has been a columnist for various magazines and websites, a contributor to open source software and a member of more committees than is probably healthy. Kevlin is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know.
If You’re Happy And You Know It (Inside the mind of a developer)
Dom Davis
(@Idomdavis)
If there ever were two peoples divided by a common language it’s “IT” and “The Business”; two poorly defined groups of people who spend a lot of time misunderstanding each other and believing that the others simply “don’t get it”, or “don’t have a clue”. While the latter claim is borne out of frustration, there is some weight to the former. In this session we’ll peel back the mind of a developer and show how what seem like simple requests can hide hideous complexity, and be wide open for misinterpretation. Aimed at everyone, including the whole spectrum of “IT” and “The Business”, hopefully we’ll learn to better communicate and avoid the common pitfalls that catch out so many IT projects.
About Dom
Dom Davis is a veteran of The City and a casualty of The Financial Crisis. Not content with bringing the world to its knees he then went off to help break the internet before winding up in Norfolk where he is now CTO and technology evangelist at a rapidly growing startup. Dom is an enthusiastic and impassioned speaker [read: he gabbles] who uses a blend of irreverent sarcasm and flippant humour to bring complex subjects to a broad audience. Whether or not they understand him is up for debate, but he likes to believe they do.
Abusing C# More
Jon Skeet
(@jonskeet)
What language could be complete without some horrible abuse? If you can’t do terrible, evil things with it, how could you ever create works of great art?
Of course, anyone can write plain bad code. The trick for really evil code is to make it attractive; to make it seduce you with it’s utility, brevity and general glamour. Pierce that attractive exterior though, and the horrors are revealed; twisting language features into shapes they were never intended to take.
As C# has evolved as a language, as its feature surface expands; new crevices can be found, containing as-yet unseen terrors.
What language could be complete without some horrible abuse. Google Engineer, Feminist and author Jon Skeet presents the unseen terrors of C# and some of the terrible, evil things you can do with it.
Hybrid code-gen: designing cloud service client libraries
How do you want to interact with cloud services? How can they feel idiomatic in your preferred language, as if they were hand-written and lovingly curated, just for you? How much ugliness are you prepared to put up with in order to use an awesome service?
Sometimes, there just isn’t enough time to craft a separate library from scratch for each language and each cloud API, so code generation gets involved – at least for statically-typed languages. The result is often less than fully satisfactory. How can this situation get better? How can hand-written code augment generated code, without hampering API evolution or backing the user into a corner?
This talk uses the Google Cloud Platform and C# as an example platform/language pair, but the library design lessons learned can be applied in many other situations – considerations such as testability, versioning, documentation, expected use cases, and expected user experience levels.
Don’t come expecting to get the right answers for your particular situation – but at least you’ll have some of the right questions.
C# 8
TBC
Developing Microsoft Communication Apps for your Office 365-powered Organisation
Tom Morgan
(@tomorgan)
Better communication is coming to the workplace. For organisations using Microsoft Office 365 lots of new tools have been added in the last 12 months to increase communication and collaboration. This means more opportunities for developers to integrate communication into business processes and supercharge their co-worker’s productivity. Come along to this talk for a full run-down of the different options, how they stack up against the competition when it comes to developer support and how you can get started working with them to create new communications applications. Expect demos and code as we go through the different ways of extending what Microsoft are providing on Office 365.
About Tom
Tom is an Microsoft Skype for Business developer and Microsoft MVP with over 10 years experience in the software development industry. For the last 4 years he has worked at Modality Systems, a specialist provider of Universal Communications services, where he produces software which interacts with Microsoft Lync/Skype for Business. As a Senior Development Consultant he is responsible for designing, developing and deploying development services projects for a varied client list including FTSE 100 companies, multi-national corporations, government organisations and charities, as well as maintaining and developing Modality’s product line of Communication Enabled Business Process (CEBP) applications. He is passionate about creating great software that people will find useful. He blogs about Microsoft Skype for Business development on his blog ThoughtStuff with plenty of code samples and freely available Skype for Business products.
Security Myths and Legends
Steve Love
(@IAmSteveLove)
Cyber Security is a term that has such a nice ring to it. So nice it seems to have become a turnoff for many people. In cyber-space the threats and risks are real, but it’s not always easy to tell fact from fantasy. This is a talk about why security matters to everyone, and includes some practical examples of what programmers can and must do to improve it.
About Steve
Steve Love is an eclectic programmer who is fascinated by the applications of technology and its consequences. He is the founder of Perfect Cobalt Cyber Security.
Bringing The Things Network to Norfolk and Suffolk
Paul Foster
The Things Network (TTN) is an open source, crowd funded IoT Network using the LoRAWAN network technology. Network hubs and devices have ranges of multiple kilometres and hubs can support tens of thousands of devices. Hubs can be built using the Raspberry Pi and a network frequency concentrator board. Devices can be easily built using LoRA SOC and microcontrollers such as the Arduino and Adafruit Feather. In this session, we will show the deployment and coverage so far of TTN, how you can participate in it by providing/hosting a hub and easily building sensors for circa £20. Get started with IoT Innovation in East Anglia!
MOBILE TRACK
I’ve been doing some syncing…
Paul Lammertsma, CTO, Pixplicity
(@officesunshine)
Storing account information is a common challenge many app developers face, and is often tackled in tailored solutions. Isn’t there some strategy to store account credentials in a centralized place?
What about multiple accounts, like Twitter? What about security concerns? And when should or could I synchronize data?
Android offers a powerful—and underrated—account manager. Let’s explore the possibilities together and lay out an architecture for engineering an Android app based on accounts.
About Paul
Passionate about android, co-founder of Pixplicity Paul Lammertsma talks about the challenges developers face when storing account data, and how Android’s accountmanager might cure the headache.
Paul found his way into mobile technologies through mobile device interaction and his need to scratch an itch for entrepreneurship. Co-founding Pixplicity in 2011, Paul has helped grow the company into a familiar name between Dutch app builders, with brands such as De Telegraaf, Consumentenbond and Mercedes-Benz. His passion for Android has always compelled him to keep up with the latest developments and share knowledge by contributing into the open-source and co-organizing GDG The Dutch Android User Group. He can frequently be seen giving ‘as-technical-as-technically-possible’ tech talks & workshops at conferences across the globe.
Mobile Development and a DevOps Mentality
Ben Walpole
(@bwalpoleuk)
The DevOps movement is a natural extension to the application of agile principles. If we are good at writing software and utilising IT why would we not complete the circle and use these skills to help us deliver our products.
If you work in mobile development sometimes this can seem like a foreign land, the way we build and deploy software can on first inspection not seem to fit with these ideas but it’s simple a matter of degrees, we can achieve the same results.
About Ben
A techie who arrived at being a Software Architect via working as a Hardware Engineer, Firmware Engineer and a Software Engineer. Currently plying my trade in the mobile development realm.
The DevOps movement is a natural extension to the application of agile principles. Hardware Engineer gone Software Architect Ben Walpole talks about how the DevOps mentality can work in Mobile Development.
Mobile Security – The Deep End
James Taylor – Proxama
(@jmons)
A look at the current available options when it comes to writing high security modules to run on consumer grade mobile phones. Looking at Trusted Execution Environment, Knox, Whiteboxing and other technologies. A technical guide with no code whatsoever.
About James
James works at Proxama by day inventing new and interesting methods of financial fraud, and works on various startups at night (@getimperium, tether). He despises all programming languages, but some more than others, and is currently the NorDevCon “Just a Minute : Technical Edition” standing champion (mainly due to a rant about PHP). (This profile contains an annoying mismatched bracket.
Acceptance Testing: Getting your iOS/Mobile Apps right early! (..and then keeping them that way)
Paul Stringer
(@paulstringer)
Acceptance Testing is one of the essential components of a healthy software development process; unfortunately on Mobile this typically results in the creation of slow, brittle and highly complex UI automation based tests. These can leave development teams and businesses left wondering, is it worth it? By revisiting fundamentals this talk explores the role it should play in driving collaboration between business and software and how it can be best applied in Mobile.
In this talk we discover an alternative approach to UI based testing. Through using Fitnesse (a lightweight, open-source testing framework) we walk through an example of how to implement Acceptance Tests on iOS that are blazing fast, rock-solid and actually improve the architecture of your app’s software. Increase you and your team’s productivity and discover the secret to answering the question “Can we submit yet?” in seconds instead not days.
Cross platform mobile development with the power of Microsoft & Xamarin
Christos Matskas
(@ChristosMatskas)
Are you a .NET developer? Do you develop for mobile platforms or would you like to get started but you don’t know how or where? Then you should join Christos Matskas to show you how to get off the ground with mobile application development using Xamarin and explains how to build powerful, full-featured, native applications that can run across all platforms. You will learn how to speed up your development cycle, reduce overhead costs and create “the one codebase to rule them all”.
About Christos
Christos Matskas has been working as a software developer for the last 12 years. He is an entrepreneur, founder and CEO of SoftwareLounge, a software consultancy firm. His portfolio includes collaborations with some great companies such as MarkIT, Lockheed Martin and Barclays. Over the years he has worked on numerous exciting projects from mobile applications to data crunching back-end solutions. He writes about his adventures in software development on his blog https://cmatskas.com. Christos is an advocate of Open Source Software and a regular contributor to numerous projects. He’s passionate about public speaking and he regularly speaks at conferences and user groups about .NET, the Cloud, mobile applications and software development in general (.NETFringe, DevWeek, MDevCon, SwanseaCon, Software Architect).
Daydream believer
Steve Charman
(@MrChaz)
In this talk I intend to take a lightly technical look at the world of VR with the intention of making you excited to get involved. We’ll take a tour of the hardware available today and its capabilities as well as what the future may hold via a brief detour into AR. Finally, I hope to show how easy it is to take your first steps with Unity and Google Daydream.
About Stephen
Stephen has spent the last eight years or so writing Android software. Before that he spent around 5 years working mostly with C# .NET. Occasionally a hobbyist game developer, always curious about new technology and APIs Stephen is currently exploring VR and AR.
BUSINESS TRACK
Leadership and technology – past present and future
Nigel Cushion, Nelson Spirit
(@nelsonspirit)
Why leadership and technology go together. Why Norfolk has led in past, is leading now, and will continue to lead in the future. How technology is making “management” obsolete but leaders are needed as they always have been. How do we support and encourage leaders to help Norfolk stay at the front of the curve?
About Nigel
Nigel is the founder and Chairman of Nelson Spirit, a social impact business supporting and developing leaders.
Nigel is an international thought leader in leadership development, a leadership fellow at St George’s House Windsor Castle, and Chairman of award-winning manufacturer Frank Dale Foods. He has also chaired of the IoD in Norfolk and a number of fast growth businesses and is a NED/Trustee of various youth charities.
Digital vs Physical: future of social
Neil Garner
(@Nrgarner)
How technologies in mobile devices allow us to better connect digital experiences into physical world contexts to either enhance power of existing digital social networks to control our lives or maybe helping to re-build our connections to real world experiences, brands and relationships.
About Neil
Neil founded Proxama in 2005 (then called Glue4 Technologies). The business focused on creating services that link people and brands using consumer technologies. In 2008, the company was rebranded as Proxama with a focus on the applications of mobile, smartcard and NFC technologies. Neil passionately believes in using emerging technologies to create valuable services for people.
Prior to founding Proxama, Neil ran a division of a niche consultancy, Consult Hyperion, where he led the systems implementation teams for a number of ground breaking products including Vodafone’s m-Pesa, MasterCard’s PayPass, Sky and Barclaycard’s SkyCard and American Express Blue card.
Neil has a MEng and DPhil from York University and is a Chartered Engineer. Any precious time at home is split between renovating an old property and enjoying life with his wife and three young children.
Getting the Technology Religion : Building Winning Business Opportunities with Technology
John Park
(@DrDisrupTeK)
In this talk I will share the simple principles I use to identify how changes in the external environment are changing consumers needs and aspirations. I will explore how to use this process to develop clear understanding of their emerging needs. But how do we find the solution? The world is filled with a myriad of emerging technologies often developed in isolation but when skilfully combined can produce the solution to consumers emerging needs. They can become a proprietary solution at the very heart of new technology products and services.
I will provide some simple tools that you can use to evaluate opportunities, not just in terms of their financial viability but also in terms of their fit with your aspirations as an entrepreneur or technologist.
Building a tech business is hard work so make sure it is one with real customers and a product they will love, one that you will wake up energised and eager to work on every morning and not another just day at the office you will dread, trying to build a product no one want to buy.
About John
Using on-demand digital media to inspire & coach entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs to create new business opportunities by commercialising new technology.
Technology business strategy is what I live and breathe. As a senior R&D executive with the Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo International corporations I built three world class organisations transforming technology into multi million $ business opportunities. My biggest success was converting my PhD science into a globally patented stain removal technology for Ariel Future, a brand with sales of £500MM/yr.
As a serial technology entrepreneur and award winning academic my current focus is on using digital technology to coach nascent technology entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs how to build a technology business opportunity. I am piloting this globally as a visiting Senior Lecturer on the Aberdeen Business School MBA programme at the Robert Gordon University and as a commercial venture via DisrupTeK Ltd. I am convinced there is a paradigm shift taking place in how we deliver education. In the future it will be on demand, and primarily in the digital domain, built around the needs of the student or customer.
I am currently seeking project opportunities for DisrupTeK. I would actively consider leadership roles in organisations with similar ambitious plans to develop & deliver large scale 21st century digital education programmes, or executive leadership positions challenged with building more effective strategies and delivery mechanisms to commercialise new technology.
The future of technology recruitment: key trends you need to be aware of if you’re wanting to hire or get hired in the tech sector
Mark Fletcher, Cooper-Lomaz
(@cooperlomaz)
Come along for a whistle stop tour of what’s happening locally in the tech sector. Which skills are hot and which are not? What’s happening to salaries and day rates? In a crowded market how do you make your business stand out as the place to be? With so many options for looking for a job on and offline how do you position yourself to get access to the best jobs in tech?
About Mark
Mark has worked in the recruitment industry for 15 years. He is a Director at Cooper Lomaz Recruitment – the region’s largest independent IT recruitment consultancy. He’s passionate about both the technological and people aspects of 21st century recruitment. He lives in Norwich with his wife Rachel, their two boys and an ever growing collection of cool and quirky guitars.
What does an investor want from a startup?
David Bozward
(@bozward)
It’s so easy, just three things, a product, a willing market and a team to make it happen. So in this session we will be looking at the good, bad and ugly of presenting this to investors and what is a good product, market or team? In this interactive session we all explore what is needed to get an investor’s interest.
About David
Dr. David Bozward is a serial technology entrepreneur, educator, mentor and authority on international youth entrepreneurship and education with over 20 years entrepreneurial business experience.
David is currently strategic lead for Entrepreneurship within Worcester Business School, developing an environment for developing entrepreneurs and growing businesses. He is programme leader for BA Entrepreneurship, a three year degree which develops the student as an entrepreneur, a business owner and also a responsible leader.
Mission Impossible? Maximise your profit and create more time for yourself!
Larkin and Gowen by Mark Curtis and Chris Greeves
Mark Curtis
(@MarkCurtis9)
Chris Greeves
Would you like to unlock the secrets behind making more profit with minimum efforts and at the same time creating more time to do the things you really want to? If so then this is the session for you. It will be followed by a workshop which will enable you to leave the day with some clear ideas and actions to implement into your business and also how you can work with your clients to help achieve the same.
The Happy Medium: Finding the balance between agile and waterfall
Asti Byro
(@MsAsti)
Surely there is a middle ground between the fuzziness of agile and the rigidity of waterfall? Astrid will explore options to add structure to your agile projects and flexibility to your waterfall projects in this interactive Q&A session.
About Asti
Astrid Byro is Head of Project Management at Comanaco, specialising in information management solutions for global enterprises and has been in the business for over 15 years. Astrid has done projects in the construction, transport, asset management, engineering, petrochemical, banking, insurance, agrichemical and utilities industries.
She has developed particular expertise in the field of distributed collaboration and is known for her “extreme teleworking”, in particular running her team from the Himalaya, and is currently experimenting with managing a project via satellite from a container ship.
She hopes, one day, to retire to run a small third-world country.
Predicting the Future – Starting a New Business in this Innovative Area
Neil Miles, Inasight Ltd
In this session Neil will share some of the latest thinking and practical use of predictive analytics and machine learning in business today as well as sharing some of his own experiences in founding a new start-up business.
About Neil
As Co-founder and CEO of Inasight, Neil has an extensive background exclusive to the Technology sector, founding and growing a number of highly successful and innovative companies. Recently accelerating the growth at ANDigital, a start-up digital disruptor and previously well known as CEO of Smart421 (now Kcom PLC), creating an Enterprise Market Leader in public cloud adoption. Neil is also Chairman of TechEast, the not for profit organisation, promoting and supporting the digital technology sector across the Eastern region.
AGILE TRACK
Individuals and Interactions
Kevlin Henney
(@KevlinHenney)
Given the commoditisation of process certification and the heavy emphasis on tooling, it sometimes feels as if the first value of the Agile Manifesto has been retconned to be “Processes and tools over individuals and interactions”. It turns out, however, that people matter. And understanding people is a tricky business. They don’t reason as reasonably as they would like to believe. And when more than one is involved, things get really interesting — sometimes good interesting, sometimes not-so-good interesting.
This talk takes a look at some of the cognitive biases, communication issues and group dynamics that affect and arise from individuals and their interactions, touching on questions of diversity, team size and effects on code and architecture.
About Kevlin
Kevlin is an independent consultant, trainer, reviewer and writer based in the UK. His development interests are in patterns, programming, practice and process. He has been a columnist for various magazines and websites, a contributor to open source software and a member of more committees than is probably healthy. Kevlin is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know.
We Don’t Need No Estimation
Adrian Pickering
(@xiasma)
Estimation is expensive. We may spend a lot of energy on getting them “right”, which of course they never really are, and that time and effort that could instead be spent on doing the work for which we are estimating. Or we can mislead ourselves and others with arbitrary numbers plucked from “experience” and “judgement” and set ourselves up for failure.
In this talk, I wistfully look back at how projects used to be planned, the rise and fall of Agile (with a big A) and wait patiently in line at Disney World only for no estimates to show up.
About Adrian
From the age of seven, when my family bought a Texas Instruments TI99/4A, I taught myself to programme in Beginners’ All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. By the time I was in secondary school, I was helping my school and a nearby primary school to configure, use and teach computing and programming. I had also moved on from BASIC to 6502. Throughout my formal education, I continued to volunteer and take paid IT work whilst studying for A-Levels and an honours degree in neuroscience. In my spare time, I wrote for an American magazine about Commodore Amigas. Pascal had become my language of choice.
Following graduation, I landed a job for a Norwich education company writing school and vocational textbooks and, later, imagining, designing and developing software in Delphi to complement the coursework. From there, a greater salary attracted me to a scientific software house in Oxford. When that company made some common mistakes at the end of the dotcom era, I became self employed as a consultant, helping all manner of companies to improve their software and processes with a focus on the Microsoft technology stack.
I still hold a fondness for BASIC, even though I haven’t touched it for decades. Or perhaps that’s why.
INVESTing in User Stories
Seb Rose
(@Sebrose)
How good are the user stories you work with? Do they help the team work well together or are they a bureaucratic box-ticking exercise that waste time and energy? In this session we’ll explore what a good user story should look like and explore why so many of them fail to live up to our expectations.
Many years ago Mike Cohn popularised the INVEST acronym to help people write better user stories. Unfortunately, in many cases, it doesn’t seem to have helped. We’ll unpick the acronym and see if we can’t construct a replacement that describes the key elements of a good user story in less ambiguous language.
Recycling tests in TDD
It’s not always easy to know which test to write next in TDD and some problems make this harder than others. In this session I will introduce you to a small problem that I find often causes difficulty. We’ll work through this together and try and understand why it was hard to solve test first.
Then I’ll introduce you to a way that I’ve been practicing that I’ve been calling “test recycling”.
We’ll walk through the problem again using this technique, and we’ll see if this might be useful in
other situations.
Finally, I’ll suggest an extension to the traditional wording of the 3 rules of TDD.
About Seb
Consultant, coach, designer, analyst and developer for over 30 years.
Seb has been involved in the full development lifecycle with experience that ranges from Architecture to Support, from BASIC to Ruby. He’s a partner in Cucumber Limited, who help teams adopt and refine their agile practices, with a particular focus on collaboration and automated testing.
Regular speaker at conferences and occasional contributor to software journals. Contributing author to “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know” (O’Reilly) and lead author of “The Cucumber for Java Book” (Pragmatic Programmers).
Perfect software: the enemy of continuous delivery?
Sally Goble
(@sallygoble)
In the olden days of waterfall delivery, shipping future-proofed, fully specified, all-singing-all-dancing products with a complete exhaustive feature set was commonsense. Software needed to be specified with every eventuality considered, to within an inch of it’s life, because future releases wouldn’t be for months or – more likely – years.
But now it’s different. Successful implementation of continuous delivery allows us to ship many many times a day. And if we can do that, why do we need to be obsessed with getting things right – or perfect – first time? Too many teams fret about making software perfect before shipping – putting the brakes on faster delivery whilst agonising about every decision.
Yet product/feature development has responded to the changing pace of delivery, and now MVP and experimentation are the norm – in theory if not in practice. In this talk I suggest that software delivery teams could do well to learn lessons from product: UX research, testing, and design teams need to become more comfortable with the possibility of shipping imperfect software. Whether that means bypassing the UX lab and focus groups, letting bugs slip into production – at the same time finding ways to take our users on that journey with us.
I’ll look at what how, at the Guardian, we learned to let go and what we still struggle with.
About Sally
Sally Goble is Head of Quality at the Guardian, and has worked on almost every product that the Guardian has produced, from the glamorous to the offbeat. She has worked in software development for more than 10 years. In her current role, she is at the forefront of leading a change in the way the QA team thinks about improving quality of products – moving away from conventional testing towards more tooling and process changes. She is also one of fewer than 500 women to have swum the English Channel solo.
Test Driving Swift To The Max – with or without the tests!
Phil Nash
(@phil_nash)
Swift is the new systems language from Apple – aimed at iOS and Mac development. TDD has not been as central to these ecosystems as its has to some others – but it is still very much alive!
We’ll look any some techniques for streamlining the process of writing and working with tests – and how JetBrains’ AppCode can mitigate many common pain points.
Swift itself brings some new tricks to the table that can allow us to rethink the traditional process of TDD – and question whether we even need the tests at all!
About Phil
Phil is a semi-independent software developer, coach and consultant – working in as diverse fields as finance, agile coaching and iOS development. A long time C++ developer he also has his feet in Swift, Objective-C, F# and C# – as well as dabbling in other languages. He is the author of several open source projects – most notably Catch: a C++ and Objective-C test framework.
Facilitating Communication on Agile Teams
Benjamin Mitchell
(@benjaminm)
The Agile manifesto helped focus software development on people, teams and creating conditions for effective collaboration. For effective collaboration to happen you must have effective communication – between your team and your stakeholders or clients. This talk will present key communication skills that can be learned, and have proven helpful facilitating many Agile software development teams. It will cover topics such as how to “debug” difficult conversations or relationships and how to create and how to create an environment of psychological safety.
About Benjamin
Benjamin has over 20 years’ experience delivering online applications, in diverse sectors – including media (BBC.com), investment banking, insurance and software products. A highly-rated international speaker, he is passionate about helping software product development teams and leaders build the right products in the right ways.
Benjamin is proud to be a Partner with Equal Experts. You can see a recent talk of his at https://www.equalexperts.com/common-communication-failures-solve/
THURSDAY WORKSHOPS
Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Regained: Programming with Objects, Functions and More
Kevlin Henney
(@KevlinHenney)
It is very easy to get stuck in one way of doing things. This is as true of programming as it is of life. Although a programming paradigm represents a set of stylistic choices, it is much more than this: a programming also represents a way of thinking. Having only one way to think about problems is too limiting. A programming paradigm represents a set of patterns of problem framing and solving and contains the ingredients of software architecture. As Émile Auguste Chartier noted, there is nothing more dangerous than an idea when you have only one idea.
Perhaps even more problematic than being stuck with a narrow view of paradigms, is being stuck with a dysfunctional view of each paradigm. For instance, many developers working in languages and frameworks that support object orientation have a strong idea of the principles of interaction, data abstraction and granularity that support an effective view of OO, and instead surround themselves with manager objects, singletons and DTOs.
During the day we will explore the strengths and weaknesses of different programming styles, patterns, paradigms, languages, etc., with examples and opportunity for discussion.
About Kevlin
Kevlin is an independent consultant, trainer, reviewer and writer based in the UK. His development interests are in patterns, programming, practice and process. He has been a columnist for various magazines and websites, a contributor to open source software and a member of more committees than is probably healthy. Kevlin is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know.
BDD Fundamentals
Seb Rose
(@Sebrose)
This course gives a thorough introduction to BDD, which is the process that Cucumber supports. There is no automation – the focus is on analysis and collaboration techniques. So, it is suitable for the whole team (BAs, product owners, domain experts, UX designers, developers, testers, and any other important stakeholders).
We’ll teach you Example Mapping – a powerful technique we have developed to help business, IT and QA break requirements down into concrete examples. This exposes misunderstandings early and will help you write better executable specifications and automated tests later.
Learning outcomes:
- The fundamental principles and practices of BDD
- The importance of Rules and Examples
- Translating examples into Gherkin – Cucumbers format for executable specifications
- Conversation patterns for discovering edge cases
- The importance of a ubiquitous language for problems and solutions
- Using Example Mapping and Discovery Workshops to achieve shared understanding
- Roles and responsibilities on a BDD team
About Seb
Consultant, coach, designer, analyst and developer for over 30 years.
Seb has been involved in the full development lifecycle with experience that ranges from Architecture to Support, from BASIC to Ruby. He’s a partner in Cucumber Limited, who help teams adopt and refine their agile practices, with a particular focus on collaboration and automated testing.
Regular speaker at conferences and occasional contributor to software journals. Contributing author to “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know” (O’Reilly) and lead author of “The Cucumber for Java Book” (Pragmatic Programmers).
CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS
iOS Testing Tools
Paul Stringer
(@paulstringer)
Are you interested in testing? Are you ready to learn some of the best practices integrating common test tools with iOS projects? Join us for this hands on testing workshop!
Testing is an essential part of the Agile software development process and in recent years the tools supporting testing on iOS have evolved to become some of the best in the industry. You will learn over how to use these tools with the best practices and principles to use them well.
These skills provide an essential foundation for the modern iOS developer to craft iOS apps that are high quality, regression & bug free as-well as a pleasure to code and work with; not just for the first few weeks, but for months and even years.
Learn how to:
- Answer the question “can we submit?” in seconds not days
- Write maintainable tests that help you build Apps that get better not worse
- Understand different considerations when testing Obj-C v Swift code
- Use tests to improve and change existing legacy code
- Spot and avoid common testing anti-patterns
- Understand acceptance testing and the role it plays in Agile software development
- Use Acceptance tests to drive more efficient development
- Work with FitNesse (an open source Wiki and acceptance testing frameworks
The Bots are Coming: Create your own Skype Bot in .NET
Tom Morgan
(@tomorgan)
There has been a big rise in the use and promotion of Bots in the past year. Social media platforms like Skype, Slack and Facebook are providing new frameworks for bots to allow companies to connect with their users. Bots can open up new business-to-consumer (B2C) opportunities in providing information and triaging incoming requests. Machine learning has matured to the point where mere mortal developers can implement it into their own applications and create natural interactions with their users. But how do you build a Bot? In this workshop we’re going to design and create a new Skype Bot from scratch, use machine learning to translate user requests into actions, and publish it for use with Skype. You’ll come away knowing how to build a Skype Bot for your company, and what you can do with it. This will be an interactive session, so make sure you have Skype installed on your phone and bring a laptop with Visual Studio installed so you can join in! Please also ensure that you have a Microsoft Azure account setup to use the machine learning parts of this workshop. Go to azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/free/ to set up a free account.
About Tom
Tom is an Microsoft Skype for Business developer and Microsoft MVP with over 10 years experience in the software development industry. For the last 4 years he has worked at Modality Systems, a specialist provider of Universal Communications services, where he produces software which interacts with Microsoft Lync/Skype for Business. As a Senior Development Consultant he is responsible for designing, developing and deploying development services projects for a varied client list including FTSE 100 companies, multi-national corporations, government organisations and charities, as well as maintaining and developing Modality’s product line of Communication Enabled Business Process (CEBP) applications. He is passionate about creating great software that people will find useful. He blogs about Microsoft Skype for Business development on his blog ThoughtStuff with plenty of code samples and freely available Skype for Business products.
Functional Programming in JavaScript
Dominic Kendrick et al, The Guardian
Over the past few years there has been a great resurgence of interest in functional programming. With higher-order functions, closures and lambdas, JavaScript has supported functional programming right from the beginning – it just took a long time for people to notice. Once described as “Lisp in C’s clothing”, JavaScript brought these concepts into the mainstream.
We will be looking at how to implement these patterns and techniques in JavaScript.
In this workshop you will learn:
- What functional programming is.
- Why it is important.
- How to use these techniques in your day-to-day Javascript code.
- What other libraries and frameworks we can use to take these concepts further.
This workshop is aimed at JavaScript developers looking to improve their knowledge of functional programming
About Dom, Pascal & Joseph
Dominic has been a software developer for 10 years. He has worked in small agencies and larger companies such as Amnesty International and The Guardian. He currently works at The Guardian as a team leader and senior full stack developer. He enjoys writing Scala and Javascript and making dashboards.
After starting his career on the trading floor, Pascal went to mathematical research while being a CTO and more recently decided that he wanted to work for a news organisation. Interested in various aspect of mathematics, technology and science, he wishes that he had discovered Functional Programming sooner in his life.
Joseph is a senior software engineer at the Guardian. He’s been fascinated by lambdas ever since he studied linguistics and used them to represent meaning in human language. Since then he’s written functional code in Scala and JavaScript and in his spare time even a little in Haskell and Clojure. When not obsessing over lambdas he can usually be found playing piano.
Mission Impossible
Larkin and Gowen by Mark Curtis and Chris Greeves
Mark Curtis
(@MarkCurtis9)
Chris Greeves
Following on for the session on how to unlock the secrets behind making more profit with minimum efforts and at the same time creating more time to do the things you really want to. This work shop which will enable you to leave the day with some clear ideas and actions to implement into your business and also how you can work with your clients to help achieve the same.
About Chris
Chris enjoys building long lasting relationships with his clients. He is the first point of call for advice on any professional matters and prefers to act as a critical friend advising and supporting his clients. Socialising in owner managed businesses of all sizes, with particular experience in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors. He also specialises in business development, tax and estate planning (business and capital taxes), succession and exit planning, auditing.