Agile 2009 Developer Jam Preview
Agile 2009 takes place in Chicago
from August 24th - 28th. The call for papers is closed, and the agenda
has been developed. The conference is composed of 20 different stages. As stage producer for Developer Jam, I'm incredibly excited about the sessions and speakers we've assembled.
The Developer Jam stage has three main components:
- Clinics - Clinics are instructor led hands-on sessions that emphasize a specific skill. They range in duration from 90 to 180 minutes. Attendees should bring their laptops and expect to write some code.
- Tutorials and Experience Reports - Tutorials and Experience Reports are in-depth interactive sessions covering timely topics that are relevant to developers. They may have some hands-on elements, but are designed as a forum for the presenter to describe implementing agile practices in the real world.
- Programming with the Stars - A lighthearted 45 minute session held daily where select attendees will have the opportunity to compete in a programming contest with the stars of the agile universe. Judges will grade the contestants throughout the competition. This portion of the stage is still being developed.
The Developer Jam stage alone has 26 sessions throughout the week on a wide range of topics. For now, here's a preview of what to expect on the Developer Jam stage for Agile 2009.
- Build Engineer Bootcamp clinic led by Paul Julius and Jeffrey Frederick. Paul is a co-founder of CruiseControl and Jeffrey has been a committer for a long time.
- Styles of TDD clinic led by Naresh Jain and Michael Feathers. Naresh is the 2007 winner of the Gordon Pask Award and Michael wrote the book on how to work with legacy code.
- Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests clinic by Steve Freeman. Steve is currently writing this book.
- BDD clinic lead by Elizabeth Keogh. Elizabeth was lead developer on the first behavior driven development framework, JBehave.
- Clean Code tutorial lead by Robert Martin. UncleBob has been a staple in the agile and OO communities for a long time, and was one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto.
In addition to plenty of great content for the Java and .NET developer, other languages are represented through sessions on Scala, Ruby, JavaScript, C/C++, and Objective-C (hmm...wonder what that one's about??). There'll be sessions on emergent design, as well as how to enhance legacy code. We'll revisit the system metaphor, and talk about a variety of different testing techniques and technologies, including mock objects. We'll even learn why integration tests are a scam. We'll listen to developers new to agile, learn of the mistakes they've made, and what they did to fix them. Of course, the experienced folks will be there too. We'll be taught how to apply agile techniques to atypical technologies, and we'll see a side-by-side comparison of the same system developed two very different ways - one using agile techniques and the other not. It's a great mix of sessions and a great mix of speakers, resulting in one very fine conference.
Update: The complete program has just been posted.
