BayXP (The Bay Area Extreme Programming Group) had a small meeting at the offices of ThoughtWorks here in San Francisco. The topic was interesting things learned at the Agile 2006 conference.
I found a number of items to add to my reading list, Including Refactoring Databases and Working Effectively with Legacy Code. (See Links below)
Topics of discussion from the meeting included
- Coding Dojo - how to get hang of test-first development and Pair programming.
- A lot of talk about how Rails stacks up against upteen different Java Frameworks.
- The TDD Pair Programming Game is an interesting way of pairing that seems to make sense. It's like a dance. I write a failing test, you implement, then I refactor, then you write a test, etc.
- The best name for a talk that I've seen in a long time was Crushing Fear Under the Iron Heel of Action. It explored how to deal with team dynamics in an Agile environment, mostly by saying "What's the worst thing that can happen".
- Found out about a web site called Developer Testing. Another thing to add to the RSS reader...
- There was a short talk about Code Debt. Some people are surmising that Code Debt should be publicly disclosed in a companies SEC S4 forms via Sarbanes-Oxley. One interesting quote was that code is an asset and you should maintain that asset properly because assets "increase the means of production". If you don't maintain code properly and use correct process your software becomes a liability. (Or course that begs the question of who defines the Generally Acceptable Coding Practices (GACP!)
