Reading time:

2 minutes

Word count:

340

Wow! I was really amazed by today’s Coke-Up conference at Skills Matter. It was a worthwhile experience and it was great to meet some of the members.

• First, let me say it was a complete different crowd of Londoners and software developers than I was used to. Most of the folk in my network are Java, Groovy and Scala software engineers, designers and developers
• Second, it was great to see ScalaTest’s inspiration in its raw form or it’s cousin. Cumber’s step definitions and feature files. The Ruby world has some great tools RSpec and friends.
• There lots of polyglot interest here from many Ruby developers to Groovy to F# developers
• I learnt a new term today “Specification By Example”
• I learnt another relatively new term “Agile Test Driven Development”
• Elizabeth Keogh’s and Dan North were absolute fantastic with their 30 minute presentation of Deliberate Discovery
• Matt Wynne was a hot with his hilarious Mortgage Driven Development
• Aslak Hellesoy was very helpful with the Kanban inspired Push and Pull request and response cards exercise in the late afternoon

Finally the Cuke.Up conference taught me to treat business analyst and quality assurance with much more respect. My goodness we are all in this software development business together. The goal is to produce better quality and business value to our clients with our software applications.

Other notable presenters and sorry I cannot name you all were Richard Paul (Cuke4Duke and Groovy DSL) and Joseph Wilks (Songkick) and  Antony Marcanos (CukeSalad).

You find the videos of the session here e.g. Refunctoring your Cukes  and the Jason Gorman’s spoof article on Waterfall 2006 development, which referenced by Matt Wynne’s MDD talk. I also recommend Deliberate Discovery.

Audioboos

Alsak Hellosoy

Elizabeth Keogh [L], Dan North [R]

Matt Wynne

Anthony Marcanos

Joseph Wilks

Thank you Wendy and the entire Skills Matter team for a great day out.

It was absolutely fantastic to bump into my CSM teacher yesterday too: a very big shout to Martine Devos.