On the 28th and 29th of November XP Days Benelux 2014 was held in the
lovely conference hotel Kappelerput. The conference goal is to discuss
and learn how to
bring software to life and grow mature systems that support business
needs.
It has a wonderfull atmosphere and fosters an environment of
participation and cooperation. As such you find a lot of interactive
sessions.
Below you can find an account of the sessions I attended.
Table of Contents
1 What happend to the why?
Gitte Klitgaard and Lilian Nijboer presented a lovely session where
they asked the question “What happend to the why”. The started their
session by asking to introduce yourself to your neighbour. Afterwards
the took stock of the different kind of questions asked, noting that
there was a considerable low amount of why-questions.
Gitte and Lilian cited some longitudinal study on the correlation
between children asking why-questions and their creativity. It seems
to be the case that children who ask a lot of why-questions end up
in more creative jobs.
Because creative jobs spur inovations it is important to keep asking
why questions. Unfortunatly, it is also apparent that there is a
decrease of the number of why-questions asked, both in an individual
growing up and in the population over the years.
The session ended with a similiar excersise as the session started,
introduce yourself to your neighbour asking only why questions.
2 Agile client: a romantic relationship to build
In this session the presenters, Anais Victor and Huy Canh Duong, acted
out different scenario’s a relationship could go through, always in
two fashions: not-agile and agile. From courtship to being married,
they used these scenes to demonstrated and discussed the similarities
differences between a love-relationship and a relationship with a
client.
3 Soft(ware)Ball
In this fun and playful session the object was to toss a ball between
different participants (components). The components could be
programmed to do certain simple tasks such as turn left, throw ball
left or throw the ball when you hear “one”.
Like in real life, the path the ball should follow was not revealed
incrementally. Upon programming the components for one task, Olivier
Azeau, would hand out a new requirement. Points could be scored by
using simpler instructions, or reusing instructions from an earlier
“sprint”.
Although Soft(ware)Ball can be played by participants without
software development skills, it demonstrated nicely software
development concepts such as the cost of technical depth, refactoring
and design patterns.
4 Anyone can write concurrent code using Test Driven Design? Inconceivable!
In an other take on the human computer concept, Thien Que Nguyen and
Pascal van Cauwenberghe presented a session introducing Tony Hoare’s
communicating sequential processes.
A set of rules was explained that a human computer should follow. The
human computer could be tested with a set of provided
test. With these rules and by sending messages to other human
computers via sticky notes, it was possible to solve a sudoku puzzle.
The session demonstrated that it is possible to build concurrent
systems by following Hoare’s paradigma and seperating business logic
from communication patterns.
5 Passion for Agile Education
One of the most interesting session of the conference showed how a
school was using EduScrum to foster learning. The session was devided
in two parts. The first part introduced EduScrum, a derivative of
scrum, and how it is used in school. The second part was a speed date
session with students and teacher who implemented EduScrum and told
about their experiences.
It was very nice to see young people grasping the main ideas of scrum
and using it to cater for their education.
6 Conclusion
XP Days Benelux is a delightful conference where one can immerse
oneself with the latest insights into extreme programming.