Simplify the Web Small and Simple things

Yesterday I returned from a short trip to Nottingham, England. I was invited there by the BCS to give them a presentation on Unit Testing.

As their website attempts to explain, the BCS is a large organisation designed to “promote the study and practice of computing and to advance knowledge of and education in IT for the benefit of the public”. There are many branches in the UK, of which the Derby-Nottingham branch is but one. Each branch is headed by a committee of volunteers who promote the organisation, manage registrations and memberships, and organise events such as the presentation I was invited to give.

I’ve attached to this blog entry the presentation I gave them.

The audience was mixed. Most of them were current or retired software developers, while most of the rest were project managers with an interest in the topic: Unit testing. On an amusing note, the room was set up with two squares of chairs separated by a small gap. When I asked who worked with Java, almost all the answers came from the left side, and when I asked who worked with C, most answered from the right!

The presentation was very similar to one I had given at the last UK Moodle Moot. The main difference was that the audience in Nottingham was much more responsive. There were quite a few very pertinent questions asked, and some good discussion.

I met Mike Ashford and Peter Aldredge there. The former and most senior of the two was a very engaging and talkative gentleman who had obviously been in the IT industry since its early days. He interested me greatly when he described how the issues we are facing today, and which we are trying to resolve with methodologies like Test-driven and Behaviour-driven development, are the same issues which have faced software developers from the very beginning. The new methodologies are not necessarily better than the early ones. The issue is that people pick up some aspects of the methodologies but fail to understand the principles on which they are based. When a new methodology is articulated, they hope that it will solve their problems, and the cycle repeats itself. So in a way, there are no new methodologies: just new wordings or descriptions of the same logical, sound and universal principles.

Peter Aldredge is the current chairman of the Nottingham-Derby BCS branch, and was a very nice person to get to know, if only on such short terms. I hope to both these gentlemen again in the future.