GLSEC

I have been at GLSEC for the last two days. Its a conference on Software Excellence in Grand Rapids, MI. The conference is organized by the West Michigan eXtreme Programming group so it has a general Agile focus. Although, I am guessing that most software conferences have an Agile focus these days. People don't still build software in a non-Agile way do they? C'mon its nearly 2008. XP started all this in late 1999. Agile is feeling very main stream to me.

Yesterday, I went to two tutorial sessions (avoiding the 'Your First Day on Rails' tutorial). The first was on a Systematic Approach to Quality Assurance and the second was about writing better User Stories. It is interesting how the software community at large (Agile and non-Agile) has taken the term User Stories to describe functional requirements.

Robert 'Uncle Bob' Martin gave the opening keynote to the start of the conference. Bob is always a captivating speaker and I never miss the opportunity to listen to one of his talks. Today's talk was on Software Craftsmanship which I thought would be on Apprenticeship, but instead was more about Professionalism.

Bob walked us through the things that we do that define us (or should define us) as professionals. There were quite a few, so I wont list all of them, but here are the highlights.

• Discipline
• Decouple from others
• Incremental Improvement
• Progressive widening
• Test Driven Development
• 100% code coverage
• Avoid debugging

This is just a partial list of the things that Bob raised. How many do you consider yourself to be doing?