And what to do when you have 21 geeks with time on their hands? Why, predictions, of course! (I want to do it again this year, check out the Google Moderator page I’ve started)

We decided to come up with a number of predictions (and bet on them), some serious, some not, that would be verified at CITCON Europe 2009, the price being beer points. And, the losers will be named and shamed, while the winners will be glorified (at least until new predictions are made, and for no more than a year, whichever is earliest).

Here are the predictions, and the actual outcome (a couple of them were settled by votes at the closing session):

So, out of 14 predictions, we got 11 right, 1 wrong, and 2 undecided.
Now, you may think that the answers were straightforward. But you need to realize that, for each one of them, someone was willing to bet a beer against the consensus. In other words, at the time when the predictions were made, it was not clear cut.

In the interest of the bets, I shall now reveal the names.
Winners (Glory to Them All!)

• Andrew Parker (8 rights, 1 wrong)
• Eric Lefevre (that’s me) (10 rights, 2 wrongs)
• Guillaume Tardif (6 rights, no wrongs)
• Jean-Michel Bea (8 rights, 2 wrongs)
• Pekka Pietikäinen (7 rights, 2 wrongs)

Losers (Boo to Them All!)

• Julian Simpson (3 rights, 4 wrongs)
• Jeffrey Fredrick (3 rights, 6 wrongs)
• Paul Julius (5 rights, 2 wrongs) — PJ is still a loser, ‘cos he has been right on bets with small payoffs
• Tom Sulston (4 rights, 4 wrongs)

I have started a new series of predictions for CITCON Europe 2010. There are two steps:

1. suggest predictions & vote for the best ones
2. when predictions have been selected, vote

To actually win your beers, you’ll have to come to CITCON Europe 2010 (still unannounced).
Please check out the Google Moderator page to propose your own predictions.

If you want to the gritty details, I have a picture of the full spreadsheet.

As I write this, 3 days after the closing, I have still not fully recovered from CITCON Paris 2009. I have been very much involved in organizing this edition, so I would like to indulge in a bit of personal retrospective, mostly on the organization of the conference. This is basically self-reflexion; if that’s not your thing, you can leave. You won’t miss much.

Here goes.

What worked at the conference:

• we had more than 120 participants, which is in line with CITCON’s goals and the highest number ever in all 11 events. Also, it is very close to the number we had estimated ourselves.
• all the people in the waiting list have eventually been invited to join the main registration list; no one was left behind
• costs were well under control, especially thanks to the free use of ISEP’s classrooms
• we got significant money from sponsors; in fact, combined with the well-contained expenses, this event contributed hugely to settle debts from the past events
• quality of food was alright (especially for a free event)
• there were a number of well-known people, helping make this event special for other participants
• twittering was big; according to my feed on Google Reader, there were more than 300 tweets. Including quite a few from people regretting not to have come.

What could have worked better:

• there was not enough food. I think this is partly because the caterer is not a real professional. Even though we had given good estimates for the number of participants, I think that, as the person in charge of the student foyer, he was used mostly to students eating on a budget. If we use such a semi-professional in the future (likely, since we want to use more free venues such as universities), we would be wise to over-estimate the number of participants as far as food is concerned. Just in case.
• Even though we did arrange the chairs in the main room in circles, we left the other rooms as they were, theater-style. This didn’t help having involved discussions (as opposed to presentations).
• I’m wondering if we have not reached the maximum possible number of participants. One of the things that I really enjoyed last year was the late night drinks with the few that dared stay. This year, we were 30 or 40 at the end. Groups started to split up. Guillaume and I led a few to the Ti Jos bar and to the Caveau des Oubliettes. Although nice, it was a bit sad, as there wasn’t really a “closing the closing session” moment. We didn’t even get to do new predictions! (and settle last year’s bets, BTW).
• Some rooms were lacking a video projector. I wonder if it would be good investment for the Open Information Foundation to buy one of those small and inexpensive projectors that have appeared recently on the market

On a more personal note, the conference passed a bit like a blur for me. Despite using OpenSpace Technology, I still ended up as the contact person for many participants, suppliers and sponsors, which was distracting. Also, helping my brother with the filming didn’t help. I even managed to miss out on the (now traditional) “Is Scrum Evil?” session, which had been a favorite of mine last year.

I still had a great time. Met Antony Marcano and Andy Palmer from Pair With Us (they are hoping to join us at the Paris Coding Dojo sometime — looking forward to it) as well as Gojko Adzic, whose copies of book was given away to some lucky participants, and Jason Sankey and Daniel Ostermeier from Zutubi… Reconnected with many former colleagues and friends, too. I also attended a few sessions ;-)

Oh, and last but not least, I’m one of the winners from last year’s bets! What do I win? Well, beer, in theory. But, even better, I get to call PJ, Jeffrey, Tom, Julian and Yegor LOSERS for a year. Priceless.

Check out

• all my pictures from the conference (pictures by others there)
• all the blog posts by participants
• my notes on the session on Mock Objects
• my notes on the session on Faster Tests
• all the notes on the sessions

See you next year, in one of the five cities in our short list (Zürich, Copenhagen, Belgrade, Dublin, and Prague).

“Going nowhere fast” by Nathan

The session on Faster Tests (led by David) was interesting, at least to the extend that it was quite clear that we are not doing too bad indeed (Douglas Squirrel from youDevise is another one that seems to be quite cerebral about tests and builds).

By looking that the various options discussed to get tests faster, I think it’s fair to say that the only way to really speed up tests is by compromising their integrity, at least to a level. In a way, to make tests faster, you’ve got to face reality and move away from their ideal abstraction (very reminiscent of Joel Spolsky’s Law of Leaky Abstractions). The only question is: how confident are you that those (slightly compromised) tests actually test something useful?

This leads to the conclusion that we only keep long integration tests because it is difficult for us to really understand what’s going on. If we did have an excellent understanding, we would have unit tests instead. And, interestingly, as we progress in our project, we find ways to convert integration tests into unit tests. In other words, we better understand what’s going on.

Also, check out my notes on the session on Mock Objects.

The Mock Turtle by Samantha Carlson

The session on mock objects, mostly lead by Steve Freeman, was a bit messy but interesting. My colleague David got to show some of our code on the screen, which was scary and exciting (he felt the urge to fix some of the tests he had shown immediately after). Also, I think I finally understood the relation between mock objects and interfaces that Steve insists on.

See, I always thought that Steve was in favour in adding interfaces directly on top of concrete classes. For example, if you have a FileManager, you would also have a IFileManager.

Steve made more clear that the idea was to use interfaces to represent a role, or (more exactly) just one of the roles that a class has. That makes sense. But, to be honest, I still prefer to have a single role per class. So, no interfaces really needed.

I wish I had more time to talk with Steve. Maybe his coming book will have answers for me.

We chatted about a favorite topic of mine: how to expand the horizons for Agile. My point is mostly that the Agile crowd is mostly talking about basic issues in software development, including during the Agile 2009 conference. I fear that this my give the wrong impression to beginners (”how, so we only need to do this and that, and we’re agile? Cool!”) and even to seasoned practitioners (”this Agile thing is not addressing my needs anymore”).
I would much prefer that we talk more about complex problems, whether they relate directly to Agile or not. This can include technical discussions or more touchy-feely ones. As long as we are addressing difficult problems, we will be making progress.

I also want to see more cross-domains talks. Obvious domains are the heavy industry (I won’t need to remind how influential Toyota has been to the IT industry) or performing arts. But that could also include things such as Behavioral Economics.

Or not. I don’t know for sure. However, I do know that we should be taking more risks. And stop presenting Introductions to Retrospectives for the upteenth time.

At the end of the talk, I mention 2 things for further reading. Here they are, plus a bonus book that I’ve just read:

• Implementation Patterns, by Kent Beck
• Rands In Repose, a blog on technological culture and managerial aspect of life in an IT firm; posts are not frequent, but very interesting (and long)
• bonus track: The Logic of Life, a book by Tim Harford; this is very much in the style of The Undercover Economist (his previous books, which I enjoyed a lot) and Freakonomics (ditto)

The podcast is available in French on the Vox Agile site. Here is a direct link to the MP3 file.

Amongst the activities that might interest fans of the Java:

• the Programming with the Stars contest where pairs of developers wll be demonstrate their programming skills in front of a panel of three wise men. The language is up to the developers.
• the Developer Jam stage, particularly dedicated to programmers
• another stage that might be of interest is Tools For Agility
• Java developers might also relate to the Agile developer, Architect and Developer personas

Here are a few sessions with Java either as the main topic, or as the language used for demonstration:

• Emergent Design & Evolutionary Architecture with none other than Neal Ford
• Scala: Object-Oriented and Functional Programming for the JVM by Dean Wampler
• How to make your testing more Groovy by Paul King and Craig Smith
• Agile AJAX: The Google Web Toolkit Experience, presented by Daniel Wellman and Paul Infield-Harm
• Creating Habitable Code: Lessons in Longevity from CruiseControl, with Jeffrey Fredrick and Paul Julius
• Java and Ruby Tools for Code Quality, by Steve Hayes

For some other sessions, Java is not central, but will be at least mentioned:

• SOA and Color Modeling by Daniel Vacanti and Stephen Palmer
• Coding Dojo: Enhancing Legacy Code, presented by Guillaume Tardif and myself
• Executable requirements: BDD with easyb and JDave (will also mention Groovy), with John Smart and Lasse Koskela
• Clean Code III: Functions, with Robert Martin
• BDD clinic – the doctor is in, by Pat Maddox and Elizabeth Keogh
• Malleable Code:  How Tests Improve Production Code, by Eric Anderson
• Back to Basics – Writing Expressive Tests Without All The Wizardry, with Rod Coffin
• Test Driven Development in Java: Live and Uncensored, with Ben Rady
• Acceptance Testing Java Applications with Cucumber, RSpec, and JRuby, with Dean Wampler and Aslak Hellesøy
• Java Power Tools – getting it all together, with John Smart
• Applying Agile Development Practices to Atypical Technologies, from Scott Dillman
• Mission Impossible: TDD and JavaScript, by James Suchy
• Leveraging Maven 2 for Agility, with Tim Andersen and Luke Amdor
• Automated deployment with Maven and friends – going the whole nine yards, from John Smart
• Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests, by Steve Freeman

Check out the entire program on conference site!

Update (06/08/2009): should have mentioned that the Cast Codeurs podcast pretty much have the same information in French.

First, CITCON will be represented by Lydia Tripp and myself during the Freshers’ Faire at the Ice Breaker. Watch out for the CITCON easel pad… and world-famous t-shirts ;-)

CITCON alumni are now a big crowd (there are more than 750 mailing list members, and presumably many more attended the CITCON events). Many of them will present at the conference

• What does an Agile coach do? by Rachel Davies
• Coding Dojo: Enhancing Legacy Code by Guillaume Tardif & Eric Lefevre-Ardant
• ATTD In Practice, by Elisabeth Hendrickson (with Pekka Klärck)
• Continuous Integration of the World, by Patrick Debois
• Executable Requirements: BDD with easyb and JDave, by John Smart
• Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Test, by Steve Freeman
• Telling Your Stories: Why Stories are important for your team, by Rachel Davies
• Automated deployment with Maven and friends – going the whole nine yards, by John Smart
• Build Engineer Bootcamp: Builds As Code, by Jeffrey Fredrick and Paul Julius
• Test Driven Development: Ten Years Later, by Steve Freeman (with Michael Feathers)
• Creating Habitable Code: Lessons in Longevity from CruiseControl, by Jeffrey Fredrick and Paul Julius
• Visual Management for Agile Teams, by Xavier Quesada Allue
• CI vendor cage-fight! by Tom Sulston
• How to be really awesome at Continuous Integration, by Tom Sulston
• Java Power Tools – getting it all together, by John Smart
• Debugging Pair Programming, by Matt Wynne
• Narrative Acceptance Tests – A Behaviour Driven Approach, by Antony Marcano and Andy Palmer
• Continuous Testing Evolved, by Ben Rady (with Rod Coffin)
• Test Driven Development in Java: Live and Uncensored, by Ben Rady
• Exploratory Testing (Framework) Experience, by Erik Petersen
• Agile testers toolkit, by Erik Petersen
• How to make your testing more Groovy, by Paul King (with Craig Smith)
• Agile Tool Hacking – Taking Your Agile Development Tools To The Next Level, by Paul King (with Craig Smith)
• The Agile CTO, by James Shore (with Diana Larsen)
• Metrics in an Agile World, by James Shore (with Rob Myers)
• Slow and Brittle: Replacing End-to-End Testing, by James Shore (with Arlo Belshee)
• Creating Agile Simulations and Games for Coaches and Consultants, by Elisabeth Hendrickson (with Chris Sims)

Also, Lisa Crispin is producer of the Testing Stage. And don’t forget that many more CITCONers will be presenting on the OpenJam stage, too! I know I‘ll be.

Lastly, I will be appearing a one of the contestants in Programming with the Stars! This means that I’ll be paired up with a “star”, then we’ll try to show our mad programming skillz and outperform our competitors. This is incredibly exciting but also very intimidating. Although I consider myself a competent programmer, I am certainly not the best, and the participants at the conference are not exactly beginners. Scary!

Check out the conference blog for an account of how Programming with the Stars went last year.

• Implementing Scrum/XP Practices using Team Foundation Server, by Tommy Norman : how various practices, including CI, can be implemented using Microsoft tool
• Build and Test in the Cloud – CI and Cloud Provisioning for Agile Teams, by Darryl Bowler: demonstration of CI practices, with the twist of using cloud-based systems
• Java and Ruby Tools for Code Quality, by Steve Hayes: using Continuous Integration as a platform for code quality tools
• Top ten secret weapons for performance testing in an agile environment, by Alistair Jones and Patrick Kua: according to the session description, there will be a connection with CI; that could be really interesting
• Continuous Testing Evolved, by Ben Rady and Rod Coffin: CT will be presented as an extension to CI
• Killing the gatekeeper: introducing a continuous integration system, by Francis Lacoste: an experience report on applying a CI system
• Continuous Integration of the World, by Patrick Debois: integration of production environment using CI
• Agile Source Code Management using Stories, Agile Workflow, and CI, by Damon Poole: real-world techniques that allow change management of features, and synchronization with source code
• Executable requirements: BDD with easyb and JDave, by  John Smart and Lasse Koskela: not directly related to CI, but it will mention how to integration BDD with your build process
• WANTED: Seeking Single Agile Knowledge Development Tool-set, by Brad Appleton and Peter Alfvin: this talk will, among other things, talk about applying agile practices, including CI, to non-code knowledge development
• Patterns of Agile Adoption Practices, by Amr Elssamadisy: CI is one of a set of practices that attendants will be asked to prioritize for discussion
• Large scale continuous integration, by Hannu Kokko: real life experience, with hundred of developers
• Automated deployment with Maven and friends – going the whole nine yards, by John Smart: how to automate deployment using Bamboo, JIRA and Nexus in a real-world multi-module Maven web application
• Build Engineer Bootcamp: Builds As Code, by Paul Julius & Jeffrey Fredrick: will discuss build systems, a topic very close to CI
• Removing Integration Delays with Collocated Whole Teams and Multi-stage CI, by Damon Poole: why and to implement multi-stage continuous integration in large distributed environments
• How to run 4.5 Million tests per day … and why!, by Mark Striebeck: how Google implemented a huge CI system for its own needs
• Enabling Agile Testing through Continuous Integration, by Sean Stolberg: how a CI system enables agile testing practices
• Continuous Integration: Your New Best Friend, by Howard Deiner: what CI is, and how is fits with unit tests, acceptance tests and development habits
• The 7 Deadly Sins of Almost Being Agile, by Bob Hartman and Richard Lawrence: never integrating is one of the sins discussed
• Creating Habitable Code: Lessons in Longevity from CruiseControl, by Jeffrey Fredrick and Paul Julius: not strictly about CI, but the tool discussed is the one that made CI popular, so this will be of interest to build experts
• Experiences Applying Agile Practices to Large Systems Development, by Harry Koehnemann: CI is one of the practices discussed
• Herding Cats: Managing Large Test Suites, by David Kessler and Tim Andersen: strategies to maintain automated test investments
• CI vendor cage-fight!, by Tom Sulston and vendors: 10 mins demos of all CI tools with representatives in the conference
• From Cowboys to Agilists – Organizational Change at Overstock.com, by Sean Landis and Kevin Steffensen: CI is described as one of the practices deployed to solve the software development crisis at overstock.com
• The Ogre and The Wimp: Clever Influencing Tricks – Help the Most Reluctant Teams, by Anda Abramovici: among other things, how to get the “I only run the build once a month” dev to do it every couple of hours, and how to get the “I only check in code once I’m completely done” dev to practice frequent check-ins
• Agile Infrastructure, by Andrew Shafer and Paul Nasrat: continuous deployment will be especially discussed
• Applying Agile Development Practices to Atypical Technologies, by Scott Dillman: CI is described as part of a case study
• How to be really awesome at Continuous Integration, by Tom Sulston and a panel of luminaries: discussion of the audience’s problems and questions
• Java Power Tools – getting it all together, by John Smart: use to how Hudson and other tools for a software development infrastructure

Phew! That’s quite a mouthful. Interestingly, there are many more talks listed here than I managed to get last year (and there are half as many talks this year). One reason could be that I was much more thourough this year, reviewing most of the sessions details — last year, I simply searched for keywords in the submission system.

To be honest, seeing as many sessions related to CI is rather a disappointment. I mean, CI is not a difficult practice, and you would think that many participants to Agile 2009 would be familiar with me. Plus, most sessions are introductions rather than advanced talks.

I guess I will content myself with Tom Sulston’s sessions (”Cage Fight” & “How to be awesome”).

• Java Power Tools – getting it all together by John Smart, 
• Build and Test in the Cloud – CI and Cloud Provisioning for Agile Teams, by Darryl Bowler, 
• Agile Tool Hacking – Taking Your Agile Development Tools To The Next Level, by Craig Smith and Paul King,
• CI vendor cage-fight! by Tom Sulston: in this one, various tools vendors, will demonstrate their CI server — I might do the Hudson one

OK, I do prefer Hudson (I am a contributor, after all). But I also watch the competition… err, I mean, like the other tools ;-) Here are other presentations I could find that mention competitors to Hudson:

• (CruiseControl) Agile Source Code Management using Stories, Agile Workflow, and CI,by Damon Poole
• (CruiseControl) Creating Habitable Code: Lessons in Longevity from CruiseControl, by Jeffrey Fredrick and Paul Julius
• (CruiseControl) Build Engineer Bootcamp: Builds As Code, by Jeffrey Fredrick and Paul Julius: though not explicitly about CruiseControl, the hosts are the main contributors to CruiseControl, so expect to hear about it!
• (CruiseControl) Continuous Integration: Your New Best Friend, by Howard Deiner
• (Bamboo) Automated deployment with Maven and friends – going the whole nine yards, by John Smart: though it does mention Hudson, the focus will be on Bamboo
• (Bamboo) Large scale continuous integration, by Hannu Kokko: the session outlines does not explicitly says so, but it seems that Bamboo is part of the toolset

Things have been moving for our little group.

Agile France

First and foremost, the group is renaming itself. It will thereafter be known as Agile France.

The extended French-speaking sphere

Second, its bylaws changed to reflect that the group is willing to help anyone in the extended French-speaking sphere (ie. French-speaking countries, non-French groups in countries where French is spoken, and French-speaking groups in countries where French is not an official language).

6-member strong board

Thirdly, a stronger team of people has been elected members of the board. We are jumping from 3 (Laurent Bossavit, Gabriel Le Van, Patrice Petit) to 6 (Raphaël Pierquin, Bernard Notarianni, Sandrine Olivencia, Antoine Contal, Laurent Bossavit). This boardis elected for 2 years.

What to think of all this?

• in my view, the name change is excellent. I do believe that it will give more credibility to the organization. I remember talking to someone who thinks that the French Scrum User Group had been created in part because they felt that Scrum was not well represented by XP France — he repeated that this was clear to him, considering the name. I do not believe XP France is neglecting Scrum, but it is just as well that the name makes it clear.
• specifiying that the association is willing to help the whole “extended French-speaking sphere” proved to be controversial. I personnally do not care much, but many thought that we can get into conflicts with other groups, such as Agile Québec. I’d personnally be very surprised if that becomes a problem.
• though I agree that the new team looks strong and motivated, I am disappointed by the slightly heavy handed manner. We were basically told “oh, we are also going to change the board and, by the way, there is the only team you can get to vote for”. A simple email to the mailing list would have helped make things easier. I think. Also, a few people seemed to be disappointed, as they would have been candidates, given the chance.
• I am also disappointed by the rather long mandate (2 years, down from 3 years in the original proposal). One argument was that 1 year is not enough to let the board members settle, and they would then be judged unfairly for their first year. Well, who’s saying that the members of the association would be so harsh as to kick them out if they can explain why they haven’t achieved much? Surely, a reasonable explanation is not too much to ask.

Anyway, at least it seems that the association is doing its best to be as relevant as possible. I think those changes are for the better.

See you next year and all the best to the new board! There is certainly work to do  for everyone.

• Check out my pictures from the meeting