June 2007 BJUG

I attended the BJUG last Thursday. I have been attending regularly for about a year and a half and even presented there last January. This meeting was perhaps the best yet. Jay Zimmerman and Scott Davis continue to run a top-notch Users Group!

The first talk was given by Howard Lewis Ship on Tapestry, which is a web development framework and is part of the apache project. While the topic fell a little out of the area where I am currently working, it was nonetheless interesting. I am planning to play with grails a bit and it is good to see how other frameworks work so I have something to compare against. Howard is a great speaker and author. We'll come back to Howard in a bit.

The only downer in the meeting was that the pizza was late. Fortunately, Howard took questions late, and our next speaker, Mike Cohn, agreed to break his talk into two pieces. Mike, who is a leading expert on agile development, presented Transitioning to Agile. I am a Scrum convert who has read both of Mike's agile books cover to cover. I was very interested to hear the talk, even though it comes a bit late as we have already transitioned. But it never hurts to review how you got there. Mike calls the technique we used "Don't Take No For an Answer". I liked the sound of that!

Mike made a point that is worth repeating. Dogmatically following "Best Practices" leads to stagnation. Only by understanding when it is appropriate to follow such practices and when deviation is a better path does a group learn to adapt. Mike argued that adaptation is a key tenet for a successful agile development.

The best part of the JUG, and arguably one of the best parts of JUGs in general, was when I got to speak to Mike one on one during the break to discuss a problem I was having with our Scrum development. Our team is tackling a large problem that we don't understand very well. The issue is so complex that a spike would not be sufficient to understand the problem. I explained this to Mike, who immediately replied, "Then Scrum is out the door!" He told me the team should focus on fixing the problem as quickly as possible, but that we should not try to fit the issue into a sprint structure. He did suggest that we keep the daily scrums running as a good starting point for communication and that as soon as possible, we restart our sprint planning and subsequent sprints. This is basically what we had done. This is one of the things I like so much about agile. It is pragmatic and usually, the most obvious path is the right one. Having said that, it was still good to hear from the expert that we are on the right track.

Another thing I like about the JUG is the ability to get together with some very smart folks and discuss software development. Geeky? You bet! Prior to the meeting, a friend, Chris, and I were discussing unit testing and the use of mocks. Chris was telling me that he had an epiphany and now understood when to use mocks in a way he hadn't before. I admitted that I still found the topic a bit of a mystery. In the fashion of all good teachers, rather than just give me the answer, Chris showed me how to have a similar epiphany. I will be blogging about this more later (and btw, I now "get it" as well), but for now, just wanted to highlight yet another reason I look forward to BJUG.

In the past, after the BJUG, I would go for beer with a couple of friends. Word about our get together spread and this month, about 12 of us went for beers. What a great time. Lots of shop talk intermixed with general conversation about other "stuff", including Howard introducing the team to a new game, Zertz. I totally suck at this game, but it is fun.

The plan is for this outing to become a regular ending to the meeting (we are going to look for a place that serves scotch for Demian). Should be a great time! If you live in the Denver/Boulder area, consider joining us.