Updated 13th Feb

The presentations this morning convinced me that test driven development is the way to go at an engineering level.  Not only does it provide a way of flushing out the  detailed requirements, it minimises the risks of defects in the final product.  The only challenge is that to do it properly needs automated test tools and they seem to have finally matured with opensource products like Fitnesse competing with commercial alternatives.  It was really quite uplifting.

Updated eve 12th Feb from the conference

Interesting day in a number of ways, not least of which was UNICOM’s laptop deciding to hibernate about 2/3rds of the way through Steve and I’s session. Hopefully we managed to cope OK even though I filled the gap with part of my standard rant about risk and procurement (it will appear here at some point soon, really).

The final presentation is here UNICOM NPWD Final Presentation

The best quote was from Chris Ambler Head of QA for Electronic Arts when referring to testing a 1st person shooter game. He was taken to task for not testing all the scenarios in a game after an obscure one crashed the server; his comment “How can you completely test something that uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to fight back”. The important point is that in complex systems (all systems in reality) not every scenario can be tested.

I had a couple of very interesting conversations at evening drinks. One was with Peter Measey about the difference between a project and a programme. He insisted that a a programme was a group of connected projects that deliver business benefits; effectively a “change programme” that does not have a proscribed end. My position was that, in the agile world, the whole focus of projects is on business benefit and change and shouldn’t a change programme have measurable end in the same way as projects? If you accept this then surely a programme is the “macro-project” that all the other projects are “workstreams” from. More to come here as well I think.

The other conversation was about the difference between project management and project facilitation which I need more time to digest.

Monday 11th February

I am presenting a case study of the National Packaging Waste Database project with Steve Watkins of the Environment Agency tomorrow at this UNICOM conference. Wish me luck!

I’ll try and blog from there as well as there are some other interesting looking presentations.