Some weeks ago I was lucky enough to win a free ticket to attend XP2010 in Trondheim. The conference was in the middle of my exam period, but I decided to go anyway. Was it worth it?
This was my first international conference ever. My impression was that this would probably be boring: Old men with beards discussing airy theories in a panel debate going nowhere. I was so wrong. XP2010 was a total blast! First of all; not a lot of beards. Not a lot of nutty professors either. It was all geek, all the time!
The conference started for me on Wednesday when I attended the Code Quality track. Joshua Kerievsky demonstrated a clever system that analyzes how you perform coding tasks. The system integrated with our IDE to figure out when your tests were passing, and when you had compile errors or dead code. All the information was presented, and you could analyze how your performance really was. The presentation included a graph where you could see how the code improved over time. It also showed how long it took you to go from “breaking” the tests to fixing them. A pattern where you had short bursts of red/green seemed preferable over a long period of red followed by a green period at the end.
The system can be used to illustrate how a specific task is performed. There are many strategies to go from A to B when you alter code, and this tool will give a signature of the strategy that was used.This is good news for people who actually want to improve their skills. I love the idea! If you observe that you tend to use a strategy that is known to have issues tied to it, you can use this tool to alter your habits. Imagine a programming task were the example solution includes the recording of the teacher (master) doing the task!
The system can also be abused for bragging purposes. I don’t know if I would like to be assessed by this tool alone, but I clearly see the benefit of having some kind of benchmark when practicing.
This talk alone was worth the sacrifice! I also attended a very good talk on Technical Debt by Olve Maudal. He reminded us that credit, technical or not, can be used as an instrument. But handle with care, or else you will go bankrupt!
I attended alot more sessions than I mention above, but these two are the ones who stuck most in my brain. I also watched the Software Craft talk by Corey Foy yesterday, and it was AWESOME! You can see it on Vimeo.
In addition to being inspired to become as good a software craftsman as I can get, I met some interesting people. Being a student I especially noticed a small consultant company called Miles. Their slogan is “Quality over quantity”. I must say I fell for their slogan, and I hope I can get to talk to them about becoming an aspiring Software Craftsman in their company in the future 
All in all; XP2010 was well worth a -1 grade in all academia
