Jose Casal and Richard Tasker Hold Court on Agile

Once again a capacity audience of software delivery professionals, drawn from across the disciplines, came together for the monthly Agile Yorkshire meetup. The number of people arriving early for the great networking opportunity at the start of the evening seems to be increasing and there was already a substantial buzz in the room at 6:30.The main speaker for the evening was Jose Casal (@jose_casal) who, whilst being based in the south east, is a frequent visitor to Yorkshire for engagements with large and medium sized organisations. These organisation typically want some of the kool-aid associated with progressive software development processes but are often typified by islands of agility in more traditional organisational structures.

Jose asserted that, compared to the industrial revolution, the information revolution has barely started and is currently at the “Model T” stage. He posed the hypothesis that in order for organisations to transform to hyperproductivity then the low levels of efficiency of software delivery teams (given as between 1% and 5%) needs to be addressed. Jose emphasised the impact of people and culture in the transformation process which itself should be evolutionary not revolutionary. There was a lively debate in the Q&A session around the theme of “slack” and how organisations might best build that into their software delivery process. This debate carried on enthusiastically into the pub where the beers were kindly sponsored by iSourceIT.

The support slot for the evening was taken up by Richard Tasker (@ritasker) - an exile from across the Pennines who is now resident in Yorkshire. Richard gave a tour of the different flavours of tools available in .NET for driving software development from examples (aka BDD - Behaviour Driven Development ). In the process he also gave a useful overview of the difference between TDD and BDD, the strengths of each and where BDD adds value to software delivery by clarifying requirements through examples which, in turn, can act as living documentation.

The evening ended with the monthly prize draw and drinks in the Midnight Bell. Thanks to all our volunteer team who make the event happen and finally thanks to main sponsors iSource IT, Piksel, Callcredit and NewRedo and to our prize sponsors O'Reilly, JetBRAINS, Manning, Wrox and PluralSight.