Note: I’m going to try to do a series of daily recaps about my trip to the SD Best Practices conference in Boston.
The conference is officially on. I mean it’s ON. Well, I guess that’s how the kids would say it. Today was the tutorial/experimental day of the week which is a fancy way of saying that the classes were three and a half hours a long.
I attended a Design Patterns session in the morning and after lunch it was a few hours of XUnit Testing Smells.
Now, I should take a moment here and explain a little bit about these conferences work. Generally what happens is that someone has a written a book about something that they then turn into a presentation. For illustrative purposes we’ll call this person The Teacher. To keep everything clear we’ll refer tor everyone else as The Class.
The Teacher, or perhaps the The Conference Organizers, then give the name of the session a catchy title in order to attract more members of the The Class. It’s a simple operation that you can try at home. First, you need the list of acceptable words:
Agile
XP
SCRUM
Test Driven Development
Patterns
Unit Testing
Requirements
Smells
Refactoring
To make a session title just stitch as many of those words as you want together. For example:
Refactoring SCRUM Unit Testing Requirements to Patterns
Test Driven Development XP Smells
Applying Agile Patterns Unit Testing Requirements
I jest with nothing but love. Actually not love, I refactored it to adoring this morning and encapsulated it into a Bridge Pattern.
On the surface it sounds like a great deal of marketing and not a whole lot else. If you walk in with a real cynical attitude toward it, you’ll probably find it that way as well. “I’ve been developing sofware for sixteen million bazillion years and, well quite frankly I’m the cat’s meow so I’m not going to buy into this marketing drivel. Where’s the bar?”
Truth be told though, this kind of thing is a great way to push the boundries of what you thought you knew. I mean, just this morning I woke up and bought up a bagel quite convinced that unit tests couldn’t smell. Now I know they can. Who knows what I’ll learn tomorrow, maybe I’ll get an English muffin and see what that brings.
