OOPSLA 2006 - fourth day

Keynote - It was good that I learned language designs that I was not familiar with. This is one of the good things to attend conferences: You can listen to what you are not familiar with and you don't understand but you can keep it in somewhere in your brain and later on it gets easier to use it when the need arises.

Practitioner's Reports -

- Transition to Software Product Line Practice - Lost interest in it in the middle because it seemed in surface traditional software process. But at the end, I thought maybe I should learn from this.
- Towards Agile SEcurity in Web Applications - It was very good.
- keywords - "How can you misuse this functionality? (something like that)" -> Misuse story.
- Automated web testing - for security acceptance(?) testing. Selenium.
-> session handling (Selenium version > 0.8)

OOPSLA 2006 - third day

Keynote - It was interesting. It's a good thing about attending conferences that you can learn different perspectives. You can learn disciplines of other fields. In this case, drama and art.

Panel: Objects and databases - I wish the panelists answered the audiences' questions directly.


After the conference day - Loren showed me and Greg his Ruby on Rails code. It was a fun.

OOPSLA 2006 - second day - Dynamic Language Symposium

Dynamic Language Symposium was awesome.

Perl 6 and Pug - I was inspired to learn Perl 6. They resolve known issues such as Dynamic vs. Static by allowing them both.

OOPSLA 2006 - first day

Workshop 1: Library-Centric Software Design

This is my first workshop other than Eclipse workshop. I expected it to be more interactive. But so far I cannot see anything different from other technical sessions.

Keynote speech - It was very different from what I expected. From my point of view, I couldn't see much related to library.


Tutorial: AOP:
It was good. The second half explained what I was looking for.

OOPSLA 2006 - preconference day

It was good to see familiar faces.
Greg talked me about different construct about Dynamic Languages.

We happened to encounter Jim from San Francisco and Jim from Florida.

Similarity in software development and new restaurant construction

These days there are many TV programs showing home renovation.
One of them is about constructing a new restaurant and opening it.
Those restaurants are featuring the owners' own concept and they are not franchised one.

Every restaurant in the show is unique. The construction is adjusted to accommodate the uniqueness. And the construction is always delayed. And you hear the frustration of the owner that they need to open the restaurant as soon as possible and to get steady cash flow in, while the opening is already several weeks or months delayed.

Usually, it is said that software development is different from constructing buildings. It is true because every software development is new and different (unique) and constructing buildings follows the established standard steps.

Actually, for those unique restaurants, those established standard steps cannot be applied because each one of them is new and different. And they suffer the same problem as Software Development.

If you watch the show, you can see the proof that waterfall model of software development never works and the proof that software development needs Agile way.

Disappointment in the current project

I joined a consulting company that is famous for Agile Methodology and software testing last week.
Immediately I started working for one of their clients.
The first two hours already told me that it was not good environment. Their technology is terribly old. They are not following Agile practices. IBM is making the systems unnecessarily complicated.

This evening, at the local Agile users group, I had a chance to consult with the main person in the consulting company. I understand that Agile is not about following predefined practices and that it is about human interaction. I agree with it. At the same time, they can't just go without making software development work and they can't just ignore the reality of software development. Those practices are based on the reality of software development. For example, unit testing - it has been important even before Agile Methodology gained popularity.

The majority of the current project doesn't have any unit test. Even though Agile is about adjusting to each unique environment and business and delivering value to the customer, I don't agree not to follow the practice of writing unit tests.

Personally, I moved to this city I currently live just to get fully involved in Agile Software Development. It is extremely disappointing and frustrating that the current project doesn't even follow the practices that many companies in the previous city that don't even care about Agile Methodology follow. The companies that don't even know the term Agile are following more Agile practices than the current client. Then what's the reason why I'm working there?

Martin Fowler said in this blog about Rake, it's a good thing to try a technology to the limit so that you know its limit. Right now I want to try all the Agile practices to the limit instead of making mediocre compromise. While I value what the main person of the consulting company said, I know that there are more Agile experts that have said that compromise is not a good thing because it leads to bad results. That's why I moved here. How ironical it is...