As last year, the UK Agile Coaches Gathering was both a great community-builder, and a total ideas-fest. In particular, Tobias Mayer (Presentation is not Facilitation) helped reinforce the poverty of presentation as a training technique, and Petra Skapa’s question about what we can learn from other coaching disciplines elicited some great stories about experiences of coaching and being coached.
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One of the pleasures of SPA is the coverage of new and interesting ideas in programming languages. This reflects its origins as the conference of the BCS Object Oriented Programming and Systems specialist group - OOPS - although as the history of the group relates, a focus on teams and organisations coupled with a commitment to reflective practice has been there from the start. But how do you get across the flavour of a new language in a short period of time? SPA workshops are commonly three hours long, which doesn’t seem much to be able to both outline what’s special about a language and (crucially) to give people hands-on experience of working with it.
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Ever since hearing about the architecture of rapid change and scarce resources I’ve wanted to talk to Maurice Mitchell, one of its leading advocates. I was delighted when he agreed to give an invited talk at SPA2010.
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I’m please to see James Shore’s chapter on No Bugs online. It’s a great explanation of how the XP practices reinforce each other to support the development of excellent code.

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But thankfully found again. Through a series of circumstances too complicated to relate, I’ve recovered (after its perambulations of six years or so) my copy of Michael (A) Jackson’s Software Requirements and Specifications: a lexicon of practice, principles and prejudices. (SRP in what follows)
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On Sunday Gojko Adzik and I joined forces to run an Open Space session at GOOSgaggle on how we might work using TDD to improve our abilities in software design. Three things (after the break) have suggested to me that this might be important –

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At ScanDev 2010 last week, Kent Beck spoke about Software G Forces (slides from an earlier version of this talk are here. Observing that the move in our world is towards more and more frequent releases to users, Kent asked the question — what does this mean for our organisations? (agile in organisations this was the focus of the track - he said he’d tackled the implications for teams and team practices in earlier versions of the talk).

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Preparing to write something on Smalltalk, Java, and the activity of design, I’ve been looking for a code formatter/syntax highlighter for the site. Glad to have found Alex Gorbatchev’s Syntax Highlighter, which does the job nicely, except that it’s missing a Smalltalk renderer (brush in the program’s terms). So here is one, which I’ll be tinkering with in the days to come, which does a comfortable if basic job of highlighting. Examples (plus the code of the brush) after the jump…
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Spurred by the discussion of Kata at QCon London, and reminded by a nice tribute to Pablo Casals in the Guardian this weekend, some thoughts on practice in music and software development. To start with, here’s Casals: when asked why, at the age of 93, he still practiced for three hours each day, he replied:

“I’m beginning to notice some improvement.”

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Some reflections on two recent agile conferences I attended (and ran sessions at). Both very stimulating, with a great deal of learning going on. Both raising questions for me in several directions.
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