Author: jane

I went along to the Brighton Bloggers meetup last night at the Earth and Stars (yum, organic bitter). There were some new faces, some familiar faces, and one face I hadn’t seen in a while. All in all a most pleasant evening.

This morning I attended an agile development seminar in London hosted by Agitar Software and Exoftware and featuring Kent Beck and Mary Poppendieck. I’m pleased to say I’ve taken away some great ideas from all of the speakers.

Kent Beck concentrated on developer testing (a podcast from a previous talk can be found here and a webcast here). He has a great view on quality – quality is an instantaneous measure, it isn’t an ongoing measure. Instead he prefers the idea of the health of the software – how does it perform under stress and respond to changes in stress (increased load, increased usage, team changes, requirements change, business focus change etc). Going a stage further, if individuals within a team can’t respond to stress well, then their software won’t either.

Agitar demonstrated two of their tools – Agitator and Dashboard – both of which are very java focussed, but gave a few ideas to take away. One great quote was “Good QA people are devious – in a good way”.

Mary Poppendieck talked about lean software development. How lessons can be learnt from the comparison with the lean manufacturing processes introduced by companies like Toyota. She has 7 principles, and obviously explained those. I felt that she was a bit rushed, and didn’t really get enough time for her material. I’d be interested to hear/read more, so maybe I’ll take a look at her book at some point. I was particularly interested in hearing about one of the vicious circles relating to QA testing. So, the problem is that the QA team are overloaded with things to test, the result is that QA aren’t available to look at development code early, which results in development getting delayed feedback (and potentially making a problem worse), which results in there being more bugs introduced, which results in QA having more releases to test…

Exoftware talked about user stories, and it was interesting to see the detail they go to, the fact that they produce imaginer users for the various roles in the system, and role play to work out the requirements – this seemed like a great, and very simple idea. He pointed out that a good use story should be Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimatable, Small and Testable (INVEST for those who like mnemonics). Some of their presentations are available online.

Can you pass a citizenship test? I apparently get a seat in parliament for getting 11 of the 15 questions right.

Childish but funny – Amusing places close to you – put in a UK postcode and see what funny named places are nearby. Some of the best results so far seem to come from CF42.

After last weeks successful wine tastings, we thought we’d give another one a try before the end of English Wine Week and so headed off to Sedlescombe Organic Vineyard. They have a nature trail as well as a shop selling their wines, and fruit juices as well as other organic products. We tasted 4 of their wines, and came away with a selection of bottles to enjoy over summer.

We met up with some friends from Aspect days yesterday, something which seems to becoming a bit of an annual event. One of them, Jules, has spent the last year or so starting up a new business, and has just launched Anagram Works in time to appear in a couple of the Open Houses in Brighton during this year’s Brighton Festival. She’s made a series of greetings cards, as well as a Brighton mug (I’m now the proud owner of one of these which will be going into the office tomorrow to replace my previous, rather dull, black mug).

  

Photos from a lovely weekend in Nice

To celebrate English Wine Week we decided to take a trip to Nyetimber Vineyard, a vineyard under an hour away that produces sparkling wines that we’d heard good things about and which isn’t usually open to the public. We tasted three of their wines before joining a tour to learn more about how they put the fizz in. On the way to Nyetimber we’d spotted another vineyard close by, also open for tastings and so popped into the more tourist focussed Nutbourne Vineyards for more tasting. A great way to spend a bank holiday afternoon.

A few months ago we went to Indian Summer and tried their Bhel Puri which was lovely. We really enjoyed it and thought we’d like to try it at home and so bought some puffed rice. All we had to do then was find a bhel puri recipe. After much searching we gave up and headed to Planet India and tried their Bhel Puri, which was quite different to the Indian Summer version. Today, we headed to the new Taj food store in Western Road and found a ready to eat Sitar Bhel Puri kit, comprising of 10 puris, bhel mix, sev, chilli sauce, garlic sauce and tamarind and date saurce – this has given me more confidence to narrow down that recipe search.

I popped into Sussex Stationers at lunchtime and spotted The Rough Guide to the Da Vinci Code: History, Legends, Locations. An interesting concept that one. A book about the facts behind a book. There also seems to be an accompanying book for another of the Dan Brown books Angels and Demons of Illuminating Angels and Demons: The Unauthorized Guide to the Facts behind the Fiction.

On a related note, I also noticed that there is an Angels and Demons tour in Rome, and a Da Vinci Code tour of Paris and Fodor have A DIY Da Vinci Code Tour: London.

A lot of people seem to be cashing in on the Dan Brown thing.