magpiebrain

I had an enjoyable couple of days at XPDAY 2006 in London earlier this week. Stand-out presentations for me were Joe and Dan’s Awesome_Acceptance_Testing and Chris Matt’s Managing Uncertainty & Risk Using Real Options, more of which later.

Ivan’s Are We Nearly There Yet? has the makings of an interesting presentation, however I think he was slightly knocked off track by the larger than expected attendance. I personally found the discussion around using actual days for iteration-level estimation warranted the whole session.

Keynote Controversy

The second day’s keynote, Love in the Age of Software by James Noble and Robert Biddle was by degrees entertaining, annoying, embarrassing, enjoyable but not quite educational enough. It was a shame to see some people leave during it (which could be down to either the previous night’s free drinks or the unconventional presenting style) – all that did was remind me that many people in our industry are actually far more conservative than we think.

dbdeploy

Theoretically mine and Graham’s dpdeploy presentation was the official launch of the database refactoring tool. The talk went well enough I think, but I think some much of audience were looking for a silver bullet that just doesn’t exist. dbdeploy is nothing more than the latest in a long line of process change hiding behind a tool (CruiseControl being an excellent example).

Anyway, the dpdeploy website is up and the documentation is being improved all the time.