XPDay6 - better than ever...

XPDay6 is nearly over, and it's been great.

One of my favorite sessions was Clarke Ching's Embracing Change: An Introduction to Agile Software Development. Clarke has given similar presentations at XPDay for several years. They've all been good and they keep getting better.

Another was a goldfish bowl session Facilitated by Nat Pryce and Jonathan Clarke asking Why Is Simple So Difficult?

It's hard to define simplicity; it's much easier to define or detect complexity (and then avoid it).

Lots of good ideas in the session; I liked Joe Walnes' comment that you shouldn't do the simplest thing - you should have the simplest thing (but it may be very difficult creating that simple thing).

I introduced Roy Sykes' 3am rule. This defines what I call simple code. It's the sort of code you'd hope to find if you have been called out of bed at 3am to fix a critical defect in production code.

My favorites session today was on LiFT - a framework for literate testing. It can be used as an alternative to FIT, but it can also be used to implement readable FIT fixtures. I'm hoping to give it a spin on my current project.

I really enjoyed the pub session afterwards. (Thanks, Google). Quote of the day - to Angela Martin, as she was taking photos of us all:

"I see you're taking a picture of me while I'm sober. I hope you have a fast film."

Ah well - off to the Old Bank Of England in Fleet Street for the post-conference Extreme Tuesday with more free drinks - thanks, Kizoom!