a view from afar

Not long home from this month's GeekUp, I thought I'd post the slides and "artefacts" the huddle I ran tonight while it's still fresh in my mind (and so I can put it to bed after a month, before I put myself to bed tonight). GeekUp was unusually quiet this time round, peaking at 30-40 people, compared to the steady 40+ the month before. But actually, it was probably about the right size for this session. The structure of the huddle was like this:

• Intro - 10 mins
• Audience writing stories - 10 mins
• Audience prioritising - 15 mins (after it overran)
• Break for coding - 45 mins (there was another talk here which gave me just enough time to code up the top-voted feature)
• Demo of Cucumber, Celerity, RSpec using the code from the break - 15 mins (for full details and links, grab the slides).

It went fairly well. Despite my poor effort at describing what the stories are for, some pretty good ones emerged. The prioritisation session was fun, with a lot of debate over whose story was most valuable, and the unexpected bonus of one guy declaring "actually, the others are more important" before sitting down. The prioritising was the hardest bit both for me and the audience, which I think made an important point.

Here are the slides, as a Keynote file (zipped) and a PDF. The code is here (zipped), unedited since the talk. Don't take it as a model BDD example, it's just somethitng I threw together.

Some people think I must have really 733+ coding skillz, but actually I did a lot of prep work, so the coding on the night was mainly just adapting a small Ramaze CRUD app. Hell I wish I could code that fast 24/7 :) Although writing web code is nice in Ruby, it's a well understood problem (if an only partially solved one), and frameworks like Ramaze and Merb exist that make it easy to drop on and do what I evangelised tonight: deliver business value from day 1.

Many thanks to the teams behind RSpec and the other tools I used tonight - these people did all the hard work. It was commented just how accessible Cucumber makes automating acceptance testing, and how little code it to make plain text files runnable.

Hopefully I achieved my goal: show the unbroken chain from business value to code in a fun and interactive way.

Thanks also to Jag for organising yet another great GeekUp, and to everyone who attended for their participation.