Agile Open Northern California

What is Agile Open Northern California? 
[Register Here]
Agile Open NorCal is an annual, 2-day event hosted by the local agile community. Here managers, developers & students meet and discuss topics that they are interested in.
Past topics included

• Team self improvement
• Coding skills practice
• Kanban
• How to test
• Communication through drawings

Open spaces are optimized to help you learn what YOU need to, not what someone else wants you to hear.

Find out more about open spaces at here.

Who attends Agile Open Northern California?

Managers:
 There are many sessions about managing technical professionals. Agile helps to improve communication, prioritize work streams, and visibility into the team and unstick teams. Managers share their successes. Many times puzzles and games are used to help understand underlying behavioral issues.

Developers:
 There are usually hands on coding sessions to help developers practice and hone their craft. Agile development is strong on continual learning of best development practices. While Agile Open space is not language or API specific, many times the hands-on discussions are very specific to the problems you are having (For example: many times a dev will open up their legacy code challenge to solicit advice.)

Students:
 This is an excellent opportunity for students to find about ‘working in the real world.’  Also they can talk and code side-by-side with both technical managers and developers.  Agile Open is a great place to ‘try out’ ideas students have been learning in their classrooms.


Details:
Agile Open NorCal is hosted at Fort Mason Conference Center in San Francisco on

Monday, Oct. 3rd
Tuesday, Oct. 4rd

8:30 am to 5 pm.
It costs $250 to attend.  We hope to see you there.
Register Here

Open Agile SoCal 2011

What is Open Agile SoCal? 
[Register Here]
Open Agile SoCal is an annual, 2-day event hosted by the local agile community. Here managers, developers & students meet and discuss topics that they are interested in.
Past topics included

• Team self improvement
• Coding skills practice
• Kanban
• How to test
• Communication through drawings

Open spaces are optimized to help you learn what YOU need to, not what someone else wants you to hear.

Find out more about open spaces at here.

Who attends Open Agile SoCal?

Managers:
 There are many sessions about managing technical professionals. Agile helps to improve communication, prioritize work streams, and visibility into the team and unstick teams. Managers share their successes. Many times puzzles and games are used to help understand underlying behavioral issues.

Developers:
 There are usually hands on coding sessions to help developers practice and hone their craft. Agile development is strong on continual learning of best development practices. While Agile Open space is not language or API specific, many times the hands-on discussions are very specific to the problems you are having (For example: many times a dev will open up their legacy code challenge to solicit advice.)

Students:
 This is an excellent opportunity for students to find about ‘working in the real world.’  Also they can talk and code side-by-side with both technical managers and developers.  OpenAgile is a great place to ‘try out’ ideas students have been learning in their classrooms.
For students OpenAgile costs just $50 for the entire event.

Details:
OpenAgile SoCal is hosted at UCI at Donald Bren Hall (DBH) on

Thursday, Sept. 15th
Friday, Sept. 16th

8:30 am to 6 pm.
It costs $250 to attend.  We hope to see you there.
Register Here

Test-Driven Cameras

I am getting old.

The other day I was hanging around with my friend, Ike Ellis.  He told me a story about his kids.  His 3 young sons had been given disposable cameras as a gift.  These kids were actually confused by the idea of a camera that used film.  The first question they asked was

“Where is the picture?”
Ike explained that they had to look through the camera lens to see what the picture would look like.  They seemed ok with that, but the next question they asked was

“How do you know if you have taken a bad picture?”
Ike said “You won’t be able to know until after we get the film developed.” To which they replied,

“When will that be?” Still confused, they continued asking

“How do you delete the bad pictures?” 
 Ike said, “You can’t.”  At this point, the kids lost interest in the cameras.

However, because these cameras were gifts, the oldest decided to actually try out using the camera anyway.
The first thing he did was to take 6 pictures of the same thing.
Ike tried to explain that he shouldn’t do that, because the camera only had the ability to take a total of 32 (film) pictures.  After realizing that he could not experiment and would probably end up with a bad picture anyway, he set his camera next too the other two and walked away.

I wish people had this same reaction to the idea of writing code without first writing tests (TDD).

Tests give you the chance:

To see what you are going to write, BEFORE you write it.
To see if what you wrote actually worked.
To immediately get feedback.

To play (or experiment) with possible solutions.



If you haven’t already, here’s a great place to start learning to Test-Driven Development


If you are already writing tests, here’s a free library to make test even easier to write


Llewellyn Falco & Lynn Langit