ThoughtWorks Manchester GeekNights - Recently Updated Pages

ThoughtWorks Manchester GeekNights Home

AndyRobinson — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:52:57 CST

This wiki is about GeekNights held in Manchester, organised by ThoughtWorks. We hope to provide a forum for discussion and dissemination of ideas, technologies and techniques in the field of software development. These events are open to the public, but the venue does require a list of names in advance, so please register for each event you'd like to come to.

Thanks to the School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, for allowing us to use their facilities to hold the event.

ThoughtWorks also runs GeekNights in our London office.

News

We plan to have a full programme of events in 2010 starting with Chris read on 21st January. Watch this space for the programme early in the New Year.

Upcoming Events

The Cloud Silver Bullet: which calibre is right for me?
with Chris Read
Kilburn building, 21st January 2010 at 6.45pm

There is a lot of buzz, confusion and FUD around the subject of clouds these days. Each of the vendors is trying to tell you why their solution is best. Architects and others who don't understand it cry "Beware the Vendor Lock In!". CEO's are saying strange things like "We must move to the cloud so we can reduce our capex.". In this talk you'll learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the various cloud types and understand what questions to ask when deciding which one of them, if any, is right for the problem you're trying to solve. This talk will interest anyone who is confused by what the real difference is between the various cloud types or is curious about how "the cloud" can help them.

Chris Read is a Principal Consultant and Infrastructure Specialist at ThoughtWorks Inc., where he helps clients design and impliment their production infrastructure, and make the process of deploying their software as painless as possible.

Suggestions for topics that we've had recently are:

functionaly programming - haskell, erlang
Open/UP
Amazon Web Services

Other TW events in Manchester

ThoughtWorks host frequent technology briefings in Manchester - more aimed at the business side of IT rather than the techie side. For a list of current events please take a look here. Previous topics have included Enterprise Agile in Practice; Guerilla SOA; Lean Techniques for IT; and How To Sell Agile To Your Boss..

Previous Geek Nights

August 6, 2009: Agile Systems Administration with Paul Nasrat
June 4, 2009:Soft Skills for a Learning Organisation with Chris Morris
January 22, 2009: Save the Videogame with Francisco Trindade, Iain Simons, & James Newman
October 23, 2008: Usability Testing with Luke Barrett
August 27, 2008: Techiques for Producing Quality Software with Andrew Stopford and Chris Morris
July 21, 2008: The Agile Primer, with Pat Kua
June 4, 2008: The 5Ws of DSLs with Jay Fields
May 7, 2008: Domain Driven Design with James Lewis and Alistair Jones
April 8, 2008: Synthesised Testing with Stuart Caborn and George Malamidis

Other events and groups

Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club - a monthly gathering of IT professionals in and around Yorkshire that meet to discuss extreme programming and agile methods amongst a host of other IT issues
NorthWest Ruby Users Group - a group of people in the North West of England, with an interest in all things Ruby or Rails
GeekUp - a community of web designers, web developers, and other tech-minded folk from the North West

The cloud silver bullet

AndyRobinson — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:51:29 CST

- which calibre is right for me?"

with Chris Read

This event will be held in the Kilburn Building, University of Manchester at 6:45pm on Thursday January 21st, 2010. The venue requires a list of names in advance so, if you'd like to come along, please register. If you have an upcoming.com username that is recognisable as your real name, you can register by saying "I'm coming" on our upcoming.org event page. Otherwise, please fill in this registration form.

This event will be held in the Kilburn Building, University of Manchester at 6:45pm on Thursday January 21st, 2010. The venue requires a list of names in advance so, if you'd like to come along, please register. If you have an upcoming.com username that is recognisable as your real name, you can register by saying "I'm coming" on our upcoming.org event page. Otherwise, please fill in this registration form.

There is a lot of buzz, confusion and FUD around the subject of clouds these days. Each of the vendors is trying to tell you why their solution is best. Architects and others who don't understand it cry "Beware the Vendor Lock In!". CEO's are saying strange things like "We must move to the cloud so we can reduce our capex.". In this talk you'll learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the various cloud types and understand what questions to ask when deciding which one of them, if any, is right for the problem you're trying to solve.

Target audience: Anyone who is confused by what the real difference is between the various cloud types or is curious about how "the cloud" can help them.

About Chris Read

Chris Read is a Principal Consultant and Infrastructure Specialist at ThoughtWorks Inc., where he helps clients design and impliment their production infrastructure, and make the process of deploying their software as painless as possible. He is one of the creators of Buildix: an integrated development environment that helps projects get started quickly.

Before joining ThoughtWorks Chris has worked as a System Administrator, Network Administrator and a Developer. Specializing in Unix environments, he uses his experience from both sides of the wall to help administrators and developers realize they're both playing for the same team.

Agile Systems Administration

richard.filippi — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:59:32 CST

with Paul Nasrat

This event will be held in the Kilburn Building, University of Manchester at 6:45pm on Thursday August 6th, 2009. The venue requires a list of names in advance so, if you'd like to come along, please register. If you have an upcoming.com username that is recognisable as your real name, you can register by saying "I'm coming" on our upcoming.org event page. Otherwise, please fill in this registration form.

In contrast with the software development community there seems to be much less open discussions about principles and practices within the field. Yet we need to adapt to constantly shifting demands of responsiveness and agility to serve the business practices such as automated infrastructure, continual deployment, A-B testing, scalable capacity all have massive impact on our field yet there are few forums to discuss this.

This talk and discussion covers the challenges and problems for System Administration and how Lean and Agile ideas can be applied to fix them, taking into account the realities of the day to day demands on systems teams time.

Paul is a experienced systems administrator, systems architect and software developer. He is currently employed as Lead Systems Integrator at the Guardian. He's worked a lot with Agile teams helping bridge the gap between systems and operations and enable smooth delivery of software. Paul is active in the Open Source community around systems tools, and is currently a contributor to Puppet - the configuration management solution.

We'd like to thank the university for allowing us to use their facilities.

Languages on the Java VM

richard.filippi — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:59:00 CST

with Sam Newman

This event will be held in the Kilburn Building, University of Manchester at 6:45pm on Wednesday October 21st, 2009. The venue requires a list of names in advance so, if you'd like to come along, please register. If you have an upcoming.com username that is recognisable as your real name, you can register by saying "I'm coming" on our upcoming.org event page. Otherwise, please fill in this registration form.

The last few years have seen a growth in languages which use the JVM. Gone are the days when only niche languages like Jython or Beanshell were the only serious alternatives. A new crop of languages has emerged to leverage the JVM and its toolset, coinciding with an increased level of frustration regarding the slow pace of change in the Java language proper.

This talk will give an overview of the current language on the JVM landscape, focusing on two of the most popular - if wildly different languages, Scala and Clojure.

This session will be of interest to anyone with a passing interest in the future of the JVM, and the new crop of languages that are being built for it. No prior knowledge of Scala or Clojure is required, although if you have any you may be able to help the speaker out :-)

Sam Newman is a technical consultant at ThoughtWorks, where he has been for over five years. He has worked with a variety of companies in both delivery and enablement roles, but tends to prefer the more complex technical challenges over coaching roles. He has written articles for O'Reilly, presented at conferences, and sporadically commits to open source projects. Principally a Java developer, he also spends lots of time with Scala, Python, Javascript.

We'd like to thank the university for allowing us to use their facilities.

Usability Testing

richard.filippi — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:15:48 CDT

Usability Testing (Thursday 23 Oct 2008, 6:45pm)
Luke Barrett - ThoughtWorks

Luke will use this session to explore the topic of usability testing. More details to follow...

This event will be held in the Kilburn Building, University of Manchester at 6:45pm on Thursday Oct 23, 2008. The venue requires a list of names in advance so, if you'd like to come along, please register. If you have an upcoming.com username that is recognisable as your real name, you can register by saying "I'm coming" on our upcoming.org event page. Otherwise, please fill in this registration form.

Luke Barrett is a senior interaction & interface designer / business analyst for ThoughtWorks. His particular interest is how Agile principles of software development apply to analysis and especially to interaction & interface design.

Once again, we'd like to thank the university for allowing us to use their facilities.

Soft Skills for a Learning Organisation

richard.filippi — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:15:21 CDT

with Chris Morris

This event will be held in the Kilburn Building, University of Manchester at 6:45pm on Thursday June 4th, 2009. The venue requires a list of names in advance so, if you'd like to come along, please register. If you have an upcoming.com username that is recognisable as your real name, you can register by saying "I'm coming" on our upcoming.org event page. Otherwise, please fill in this registration form.

What sort of attitudes and interactions do we need, in order to figure out together how to improve our work processes ?
Can we debug our mindsets and relationships ?

This workshop will explore what Chris Argyris wrote about these questions, by means of discussion and role playing games.

Chris Morris works for the Science and Technology Facilities Council. He leads a scattered team developing a laboratory management system for molecular biologists. He says that some time ago he realised that coding wasn't the hardest part of delivering software that people want to use.

We'd like to thank the university for allowing us to use their facilities.

Save The Videogame

richard.filippi — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:15:09 CDT

Save the Videogame with Iain Simons & James Newman (Thursday 22th January @ 6:45 pm)

This event will be held in the Kilburn Building, University of Manchester. The venue requires a list of names in advance so, if you'd like to come along, please register. If you have an upcoming.com username that is recognisable as your real name, you can register by saying "I'm coming" on our upcoming.org event page.

STOP PRESS: we are also hoping to have ThoughtWorks' Francisco Trindade along to talk about an agile approach to Games Development

Save the Videogame

Videogames are disappearing.
No, really. They are.

Consoles, cartridges, discs, and tapes gather dust in lofts. Crucial prototypes get thrown away when studios go bust, rare versions of classic games are lost forever. Every day, we lose bit of our history.
We need a National Videogame Archive.
Luckily, we've just started one.

Tonight, Iain Simons and James Newman will be explaining the origins of this new project, and addressing the issues surrounding digital heritage, inviting you to have your say in the preservation of this most important of cultural forms.

Issues addressed will include:

Cultural Elitism
How to preserve Fan-Culture
The challenges of translation and access
Horace goes Skiing,

As well as being an incisive look at the cultural and technical challenges of digital preservation, Save the Videogame will also feature plentiful opportunities for the audience to win prizes.
We've enjoyed games for years.
They need our help now.

http://www.savethevideogame.org

Web Based Integration

richard.filippi — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:14:49 CDT

with Dr. Jim Webber (Thursday 19th February @ 6:45 pm)

Abstract

As integration capabilities become an everyday part of development, the enterprise application integration vendors were quick to realise their traditional business model was under threat. On the back of their large installed bases, vendor products were offered to customers to help them deploy and manage their attempts to develop Service Oriented
Architectures, with the implication that middleware remains a prerequisite to create successful distributed systems.

In this talk Jim will discuss how protocol-centric approaches like the Web and RESTful styles can constitute a robust integration fabric, providing the same benefits as proprietary middleware without vendor lock-in, and show how incremental, endpoint-centric integration is a viable strategy for Service-Oriented systems.

Presenter Bio

Dr. Jim Webber is director of professional services for ThoughtWorks where he works on dependable distributed systems architecture for clients worldwide. Jim was formerly a senior researcher with the UK E-Science programme where he developed strategies for aligning Grid computing with Web Services practices and architectural patterns for dependable Service-Oriented computing and has extensive Web and Web Services architecture and development experience. As an architect with Hewlett-Packard, and later Arjuna Technologies, Jim was the lead developer on the industry's first Web Services Transaction solution. Jim is an active speaker and is invited to speak regularly at conferences across the globe. He is an active author and in addition to "Developing Enterprise Web Services - An Architect's Guide" he is working on a new book on Web-based integration. Jim holds a B.Sc. in Computing Science and Ph.D. in Parallel Computing both from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

His blog is located at http://jim.webber.name.

The Agile Primer

richard.filippi — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:14:37 CDT

Pat Kua (July 21, 2008)

Why is everyone talking about agile? What does agile mean? How does it affect me? How is it different from traditional software development? We're going to have a look at the forces that resulted in the agile movement and have a look at the impact this can have on software development. This is an introduction to the values and principles of agile, understanding perhaps some of the ways they manifest into practices.

We'll have some interactive elements in this session, including addressing participant's Hopes and Concerns, and having a go at building the key set of values for Agile Software Development.

This event will be held in the Kilburn Building, University of Manchester at 6:30pm for 7 on Monday July 21, 2008. The venue requires a list of names in advance so, if you'd like to come along, please register. If you have an upcoming.com username that is recognisable as your real name, you can register by saying "I'm coming" on our upcoming.org event page. Otherwise, please fill in this registration form.

We'd like to thank the university for allowing us to use their facilities.

The video recorded on the evening is now up on Vimeo. Thanks Paul for the encoding tips. Unfortunately the video freezes a couple of times - I think it's a problem somewhere in the multiple stages of conversion/encoding - but the audio, the important bit really, carries on.
Patrick's slides are available for you to download (PPSX) or (PDF).

Techniques For Producing Quality Software

richard.filippi — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:14:18 CDT

A Geek Night Double Bill! (27 Aug 2008)

This event will be held in the Kilburn Building, University of Manchester at 6:30pm for 7:00pm on Wednesday August 27, 2008. The venue requires a list of names in advance so, if you'd like to come along, please register. If you have an upcoming.com username that is recognisable as your real name, you can register by saying "I'm coming" on our upcoming.org event page. Otherwise, please fill in this registration form.

MbUnit - Unit Testing on Crack!
Andrew Stopford

If you're unit testing in .NET, you're probably using test frameworks like NUnit or MSTest. These frameworks are handy but don't encourage efficient testing, wasting your time as you write libraries of custom asserts and fixtures. Stop writing a vast number of asserts to ensure your test are effective. Stop writing custom asserts or fixtures to get around limitations of these frameworks. Save time. Save money. Make your tests run to their full potential. This session will look at MbUnit an open source unit testing framework for .NET that can do all that. It's unit testing on crack! (This talk was previously given at AgileNorth 2007 and now updated for the v3 alpha release.)

Andy Stopford is a software engineer, blogger and author from Manchester, and a new dad to his beautiful baby girl. He was MbUnit’s former lead and its current poobah.

Eliciting Quality Goals
Chris Morris

For one software project, the most important quality might be accuracy, followed by usability, followed by scalability. For another project, other goals might be important, and the order of priority might be different. Developers are effective at meeting the quality goals that they feel are important, and different views on the priorities for quality are a common cause of conflict among developers. Ensuring that all the developers understand which sorts of quality matter most to the end users and those who are paying for the project is an important step towards success.

Unfortunately obtaining clear and accurate answers about quality goals is not easy. This workshop will model in a short time a way of eliciting a ranked set of quality goals. Participants will have an opportunity to discuss the different types of software quality and the trade offs between them, in the context of an experience that will equip them to elicit quality goals from the stakeholders of their current and future projects.

A quality policy consists of a ranked list of goals, processes which it is believed will attain those goals, and a plan for checking whether the goals were achieved. The workshop will make such a policy, based on a consensus view among the participants. However, the emphasis will be on the fact that each project needs its own quality policy.

Chris Morris has worked as a software developer on a variety of projects, including four years as a project manager and team leader. He began his software development career by developing in IBM assembler language for a utility company and went on to become a web developer for an ISP. Later he joined a UK government research laboratory with the brief of developing software to support biologists, and eventually became a project leader of a multi-disciplinary team developing a laboratory information management system for molecular biology in 2005, a post he still holds.

Images from Last Nights Session:

As promised I'm posting pictures of the flipchart outputs that we produced yesterday. (They're not terribly clear thanks to Apple for the camera on the iPhone...)

Apologies to Chris in advance as I may have not quite got things correct yet. I'm hoping that he might log in and tidy this up for me...

Here first of all are the various categories that we posted against. We used green / yellow post-its to record the things in our current project that we are proud of; and purple / blue post-its to record things we are concerned about. Sorry, that you probably can't read the post-its on these pictures but you get the mix...

To summarise the categories are:

Portability	- adaptability - installability - co-existence - replaceability
Functionality	- suitability - accuracy - inter-operability - security
Reliability	- maturity - fault-tolerance - recoverability
Usability	- understandability - learnability - operability - attractiveness
Efficiency	- time-behaviour - resource utilisation
Maintainability	- analysability - changeability - stability - testability
Other

Chris then took the categories with the majority of post-its and invited us to vote. 3 x votes for categories with room for improvement; 3 x votes for categories which are important to us and in each case you must vote for 3 distinct categories. This produced the following:

It's then possible to plot the categories on a grid, votes for room for importance against votes for room for improvement.

The stuff in the top-left is that which is important and where we think there is room for improvement.

Finally you examine the items in the top-left of the grid and attempt to answer the questions -

How do we find out our current level of quality in this category ?
What Metrics should we use to determine quality in this category ?
How do we know that we're improving quality in this category ?

How will we assess testability?

How easy is to to write a new test?
How great are the dependencies?
Running tools: Ndepend

What metrics for testability will we monitor?

Output from tools named above, e.g. dependency metrics, Npath complexity.
Code coverage.
Code coverage of automatic testing.
Number of defects in production code reported by users.

How will we improve testability

Training developers, and winning buy in.
Pair coding and pair testing.

Here are the categories, with the text from the post it notes. They are ranked by the product of importance and improvability.

Name Importance * Improveability Descriptions + if the code has the quality - if the code lacks the quality

Usability 17*12	+ Good GUI + usability / Good GUI – UI – User interface - User interface (intuitiveness) + User interface improvements (V2 of a system)
Maintainability: Testability 13*14	- level of testing – lack of test coverage + high test coverage + test coverage - not enough time to UAT / System Testability + Testability + testability + Many unit tests - legacy code
Maintainability: Changeability 11*12	- no “living” design documentation – no DRY - absence of architectural vision + Given changing requiremens, how we still manage to deliver releases - lack of unit tests – lack of automated testing - quality of repeatable testing (unit, integration, and regression) + Maintainability / flexibility + Easy to deploy - More complicated than it needs to be (based on legacy code) - unconfidence of changes implications due to code complexity
Reliability 12*11	+ It works! +Automated acceptance tests + Continuous integration + Database versioning + Scalability and stability
Functionality: Suitability 10*11	- Does the software produced actually conform to what the business wanted? + Meeting User's needs + It works + Simple to use + Just works - Killer functionality removed - No true entities in the DDD sense - Lack of user input + Simplifies complex concepts
Portability 1*3	- No separation of concerns - Incomplete reference architecture affecting the overall quality of the system + Excellent domain model and decoupled data store + Extensible + Deployed to test environment today and it worked first time!

We'd like to thank the university for allowing us to use their facilities.

The 5Ws of DSLs

richard.filippi — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:13:48 CDT

Jay Fields (June 4,2008)

Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) have been around for a very long time; however, the past 2 years have brought a resurgence of interest to the topic. DSLs are a great idea, but they are the most beneficial when used appropriately. This talk will discuss who DSLs are designed to help, what is a DSL, when you should create a DSL, where you should apply DSLs, why DSLs are important, and how to get started with DSLs. We will begin at the introduction level, almost no previous knowledge of DSLs is necessary.

This event will be held in the Kilburn Building, University of Manchester at 6:30pm for 7 on Wednesday June 4, 2008. The venue requires a list of names in advance so, if you'd like to come along, please register. If you have an upcoming.com username that is recognisable as your real name, you can register by saying "I'm coming" on our upcoming.org event page. Otherwise, please fill in this registration form.

Jay's slides are available for you to download. They are large (~30MB) - those pretty flamigoes don't come for free! Some have reported problems opening them directly in the browser but downloading them to your local machine has worked for me.

Thanks to the university for allowing us to use their facilities.

Synthesised Testing

richard.filippi — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:13:33 CDT

George Malamidis and Stuart Caborn (April 8,2008)

Currently we believe that developers are writing unnecessary dependency wired tests to cover uncertainty about the validity of simulated interactions in their dependency neutral tests. In other words, we cannot be certain that all our simulated interaction based tests ‘join up’. If it were possible to correlate the simulated interactions in our tests, then we should be able to do away with the need to write large numbers of complex, slow and brittle wired tests (apart from those which interact with the boundaries of the SUT). Synthesis combines lightweight tests to build confidence that the system under test is complete and reduces the need for large, overarching tests.

George has posted the slides on his blog.

Domain Driven Design

richard.filippi — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:13:09 CDT

Alistair Jones and James Lewis (May 7,2008)

Domain Driven Design is a philosophy for writing software, that places emphasis on a business-aligned domain model, and provides a vocabulary for how to implement the model in object oriented code. Following DDD when writing business software focuses effort on the high-value parts of the system, and helps consistent translation of business concepts into objects.

We give an overview of Domain Driven Design and then discuss the practical implications of following it. How do you implement an isolated domain model? What kinds of objects do you need in your model? How does your model make use of Dependency Injection and Object-Relational Mapping? We will introduce an example business domain, identify roles that objects could play in the domain model, and then show how to implement those objects in code. Are you following DDD? What are your experiences with it? What are the reasons why you wouldn't choose to follow it?

Previous Geek Nights

richard.filippi — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:12:29 CDT

There is no abstract available for this page revision.

Suggestions

alex.scordellis — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:45:22 CDT

If there are any topics you'd be interested in, please make a post in the threading section below.

Existing suggestions:

approaches to UI testing e.g. WatiR, Selenium
interactive coding/hacking/dojo sessions
workshop to discover what defines software quality for you (suggested, and to be led by, Chris Morris)
practical introduction to agile (date now announced! The Agile Primer - July 21)

Kilburn Building

alex.scordellis — Tue, 13 May 2008 01:50:37 CDT

We hold the GeekNights in the Atlas Suite, in the Kilburn Building, School of Computer Science, University of Manchester.

To find us, walk down the right (south) side of the Kilburn building (to the right of the metal steps) until you reach the goods entrance. The porter at the desk will open the door for you. There will then be signs to the Atlas Suite, which is upstairs.
We'd like to thank the University for making their facilities available to us for this event.