So, last Wednesday to Friday I've been in Antwerp for the Devoxx Java developers conference. Although I am a developer, my side interests in project and information structuring have grown over the years, and so I was quite happy to see some interesting talks on that subject on the programme.
The first talk I went to apart from the keynote, was one about software estimation. The speaker discussed how you can make proper estimates about the amount of time a certain task will take, and how to take various environmental variables into account. He stressed that estimates cannot be argued about, because when you do that, you are in fact debating the premises for the estimates.
The subject of the next interesting talk was so-called behaviour driven development, a way to make sure you write tests for your program that actually test the intended behaviour instead of the actual implementation. For example, assuring that the increase function does indeed add 1 to its input is very nice, but when the behaviour of the program should be to decrease instead, that outcome says nothing.
On Thursday, I visited a talk titled "Be smart!". The very enthousiastic speaker (Ivar Jacobson, who was a key designer for various of the currently used business engineering and modelling processes) described how you can avoid the common pitfalls with agile development by simply... being smart. That is to say, recognising a problem when you see one.
Next to these three talks, I've been to various more technical topics (some brought very well, others were extremely boring), had my fair share of alcohol, and of course great fun. Over the next few weeks I will try to combine all those experiences together with those from the book I just finished reading (Spring Into Technical Writing for Engineers and Scientists) in some form. At the very least I should be able to make a nice set of notes.
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