March 2012 Meeting
The March 2012 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th of March, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will be providing the space, at their offices on Goswell Road; The Skills Matter eXchange. Registration details are given below.
Agenda
TDD Fishbowl
Stuart Eccles, fresh from talking about Conan the Deployer at our February Meeting, has offered to organise a Fishbowl session focussing on approaches to TDD.
The idea is not to focus on tedious tool debates like Test::Unit vs. RSpec or Cucumber vs. raw ruby for integration testing; these debates have rang throughout the ages and will continue to do so. We want to explore other debates, such as Obie Fernandez's suggestion that TDD might not be the best approach for early-stage startups.
The format on the night will be that we'll have a couple of short opening statements from the panel to seed the discussion and then get going on the discussion. The fishbowl format means that we have 5 chairs at the front, 1 of which is empty. People on the chairs can speak, and if someone from the audience wants to add something to the conversation, they can go up and take the empty chair. As soon as this happens, one of the original panelists must go and sit down.
The initial panel will be:
- Stuart Eccles - Writing tests before validating the business value is pointless
- Tom Stuart - Rails encourages you to to TDD wrong
- Joseph Wilk - The cargo culting of TDD without considering if and why
- Tom Stuart - The "fast specs" paradigm is a red herring for producing better code
Murray Steele will act as moderator, but anyone can get involved by claiming the empty fifth chair.
Pub
It'll probably be a lively debate, and we'll want to carry on after 8pm. We do this by heading over to The Slaughtered Lamb where we can continue in more informal settings. If you can't make the talks you really should come along for the pub.
Registration
To secure a place at the meeting you must register with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it's polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
Posted by Murray Steele on Feb 26, 2012