Jakob Wolman
On November 19–21 I participated at Øredev, the prime dev conference held every year in Malmö, Sweden. Actually it was my 11th year at the conference, and I am not only participating, I am part of the program committee inviting speakers around the topics of people and teams, together with the ever so great Martin Rosén-Lidholm.
Many people ask me about my takeaways from the conference, so I thought I’d share them here. During the conference I tweeted my notes live from the sessions I attended, and you can still read them in my twitter feed.
Here are some of my favorite sessions. You can see all the videos from the conference here.
Jeff Gothelf — Sense and Respond — Continuously learning our way to better outcomes
This is a talk everyone that works with software should see. At least once. It reminds us that we hold a certain power as makers of software. The choices we make have implications on people’s life, whether it is by design or through unintended consequences. There is a lot we can do to be aware of the outcomes we are creating. For a modern software developer “I just want to code” simply does not cut it. But there is a lot you can do:
Watch the whole session here:
Pat Kua — Building evolutionary architectures
In this presentation architecture is presented as something you design with change in mind. We know change is going to happen in the system, so we optimize our architecture to deal with it. The architecture evolves and improves iteratively, and this is a new way of thinking about architecture. It really is not a one-off, but something that evolves over time. I really liked the idea of using fitness functions to guide the architecture. That is decide on metrics that are important for the architecture (like coupling), measure those in the code and include them in automated tests so you know what effects your code has on the architecture.
There is a book that covers this topic written by Pat, Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons.
Judy Rees— Getting them to get it
The feeling of not being understand and then concluding that other people are idiots has probably been felt by almost everyone. Judy explains that one of the keys to overcoming this is to listen. The more you listen before you speak, the more influential yo will be. She shares tricks like parrotphrasing (which comes from the wonderful book Never split the difference) and how to ask good questions. The session contains a few good exercises (that don’t give justice to the video).
Doc Norton — Escape velocity — Better metrics for software teams
In this talk Doc explains why velocity is basically a useless metric, and shows some good alternatives to what you could measure instead. Short explanation for why velocity can’t be trusted is because it is a lagging indicator of a complex system. You don’t want to base important decisions on that. Alternatives are things like code complexity, escaped defects and WIP. Also a good explanation of how to read a cumulative flow diagram:
Karl Scotland** — Failure is not an option**
The title of this talk is part of a quote “failure is not an option, it is mandatory”. It is pointing us to the idea that if we always succeed, we never learn. In this talk Karl talks about creating an environment for experiments, how to learn from your data and how to make sure that you are safe to fail. He talks about human biases that we use to make up excuses and that leads us down the wrong path. It is important to be aware and explicit about these things when you are introducing change into an organisation. As an example Karl showed this great video that created a lot of uncomfortable chuckles.
video created byJason Little
Unfortunately the video of the talk is not available yet, but I will update this post once it is.
All in all Øredev 2018 was great. I received a lot of positive feedback about the topics and the sessions. I already have a lot of ideas of what to include in the program for next year but I would love to hear what you would like to see. Which topics and speakers would you want to learn from? Let me know.