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Tools, Frameworks and Libraries: the Devil's work or Manna from Heaven?

hillmlogica and Giovanni Asproni

Developer Community Track
Scheduled Time: 
Tuesday 20 November 2007, 11:00 to 12:30
Room: 
Southwark Cathedral, The John Trevor Williams Room
Session type: 
workshop
Intended audience and experience level: 

Developers, Testers, any experience level

Prerequisites: 

None

What happens when you put together a crack development team and get them to decide which tools, frameworks and libraries they'll need to do the job? Will we get (a) a happy consensus reached by rational argument, (b) a never-ending irrational argument about which automated testing frameworks to use? We're not sure what to expect, but we're looking forward to finding out what YOU think is important!

Shared love, Shared pain

In this session, we want to the attendees to argue amongst themselves (in small groups) about what's important to consider when choosing tools, frameworks and libraries for your greenfield project. We want you to share your experience, and hear from others.

For example:

  • What's most important to avoid?
  • What's important to look for?
  • What's not important at all?

And, for Agile, iterative projects:

  • When is it simpler to use an additional tool/framework/library?
  • When is it appropriate to choose to use a framework today because it will probably be useful in the future?

Format

  1. Brainstorm what tools, frameworks and libraries have you used or been forced to use
    in the past year. Get people to write up on sticky notes and group them. (15 mins)
  2. Divide people into teams. Teams will be assigned an application to build (with the session leaders acting as the customer), e.g. Web 2.0 social networking site,
    or 50-user business GUI application etc. (5 mins)
  3. Groups discuss and argue about what tools, frameworks and
    libraries are important or not, either to use or avoid, for their project. Groups will write up a chart indicating their consensus on what they think (20 mins)
  4. Groups further narrow down their choices towards what's most/least important by a couple of rounds of voting (15 mins)
  5. Groups now reflect on the previous section. In cases where there was consensus, why was this? In cases where there was uncertainty or disagreement, why was this? (15 mins)
  6. As a whole, retrospect (15 minutes) - what are the common features of the favourites?
    what are the common features of the least important? what disagreements
    did you have? why?

hillmlogica

This presenter hasn't provided a bio yet.

Giovanni Asproni

Giovanni is an independent consultant with several years of experience in which he worked in a variety of application domains including CASE tools, telecommunications, bioinformatics, and banking. His main professional interests are agile software development, software design and development, software project management, and, last but not least, writing code. He was the chair of the 2006 edition of the London XPDay, and also the chair of the ACCU conference (http://www.accu.org/conference). He is a member of several professional associations: the ACCU, the AgileAlliance, the ACM, and the IEEE Computer Society.