This was the last day of the conference and it was dedicated to workshops (academic and industrial**). I started the day in the Refactoring (academic) workshop and after coffee break I switch to the Retrospectives (industrial) Workshop by Paulo Caroli which was one of the best sessions I attended in the whole conference. Paulo shared many techniques to plan/guide retrospectives, many of them are documented in his book Fun Retrospectives.

After the lunch it was the time to delivery my BDD Tutorial, a technical hands-on session where we reviewed the BDD technique and several implementation details with tools like Cucumber-JVM, Fitnesse and JBehave. Everything went as expected, no major issues with the technical stuff, all participant were able to run the Virtual machine I created for the tutorial. I am very happy with the results and I think I will plan to run it again in South America before the end of the year.

 

** academic workshop are basically presentation and discussions about formal research papers while industrial workshops are totally different, they are interactive sessions where the audience listen and do.

As usual we started with the keynote, in this occasion by Brian Fitzgerald (Irish Software Engineering Research Centre). He talked about New directions for Software Development Process. He started with a summary of the evolution of software development process and after that he focused on the impact of Open Source movement and Crowd funding initiatives.

After the keynote I attended to the Lightning talks session where I found some interesting presentations performed by Brazilian folks (Paulo Caroli and Rafaela Fontana).

In the afternoon I attended to the testing track where I saw the most interesting sessions of the day: Llewellyn Falco talking about Getting Existing Code under Tests and Charlie Poole’ demo: From Test to Theories and back  again. Excellent speakers and very useful information.

The last session I attended was Pragmatic Architecture for Agile Teams by Janne Sinivirta, it was fine, nothing new for me but it was a useful summary of key points.

Finally at 5 PM it was the main conference closing (even when the next day there were some more workshops). As usual the closing included a retrospective activity, thanks to everyone and the announcement of the next year conference which will be held in Edinburgh.

 

First of all I need to do a brief explanation of the conference layout. The main part of the conference takes place during Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. In addition to that, there are additional workshops on Monday and Friday.

So on Tuesday was the conference opening. As expected it started with the welcome by Maria Paasivaara (general chair). After that, Janne Järvinen offer a brief presentation of the Need for Speed program. A program in Finland that aims to join students and industry. Next there was the keynote by Linda Rising who talked about Continuous Retrospective. The keynote was fine, I wrote down some resources to check.

At the end of the keynote, every speaker of that day had 30 seconds to present his session and perform an invitation, good idea.

The next session I attended was Why we need architects by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. It was interesting but nothing new for me, so in the middle I switched to the session by Nitor guys who perform a technical demo of their tool Willow which provides support for elastic cloud deployments. I really liked it.

In the afternoon I  attended to a Continuous Delivery session by Omenia guys, nice session. After that it was my first session: Continuous Delivery at Enterprise level with Jenkins and Octopush (the tool I developed with OLX guys). Everything went fine, the demo was successful but just in case I had prepared a short demonstration video. The slides are available here.

The next session I attended was a panel about Continuous Delivery. I stayed there just 15 minutes and I left the room because to my surprise the debate was very poor. I moved to another session about contracts by Antti Kirjavainen which was much better.

Finally we got to the best part of the day: the open space, yeah!!!! We had a marketplace to collect sessions for the three days. The facilitator was Charlie Poole and I liked his performance. After the marketplace we had like a cocktail and next to it the open space sessions started. We had 3 hours from 19.00 to 22.00 with up to 7 parallel sessions. For me the best session was the one I proposed: Programming practices. The goal was simple: share ideas/practices/tips among programmers. Four person joined the session: Daniel (a coach from Germany), Sebastian (a developer/trainer from Sweden), Wouter (a consultant from Holland) and Oller (a tech lead from Sweden). For me it was a great session, I really enjoyed it.

The first session I attended was a workshop by Wouter Lagerwaij: Continuous Delivery with Docker and Jenkins Job Builder.  It was really really interesting, the speaker was an expert on the topic and the workshop’s materials were very properly prepared. I took several useful notes to review. When the workshop finished (on time, of course) we had lunch.

The lunch was self-service and included salad, fish, potatoes, cheese and bread. After lunch there was also coffee and tea available.

In the afternoon I had to choose between Fearless Change workshop by Linda Rising and DevOps and Continuous Value Delivery with Lego and Chocolate workshop by Dana Pylayeva. What do you think I choose? Yes, of course, the second one because is more related to the concerns I usually work. The workshop was fine, after brief conceptual introduction we worked in groups in an activity similar to El Pajarraco but with with a different focus: business value and team collaboration. I liked the activity and also the way Dana presented the DevOps theory.

The last activity of the day was a reception at the City Hall where we shared some drinks and soft food. It was a nice networking activity were I met people from several countries including: Holland, Slovenia, USA, Spain, Sweden, Brazil and Finland of course.