Michael Feathers, Object Mentor

Michael Feathers is a consultant with Object Mentor. He balances his time between working with, training and coaching various teams around the world. Prior to joining Object Mentor, Michael designed a proprietary programming language and wrote a compiler for it, he also designed a large multi-platform class library and a framework for instrumentation control. Publically, Michael developed Cppunit, the initial port of JUnit to C++, and FitCpp, a C++ port of the FIT integrated-test framework. Michael is also the author of the book 'Working Effectively with Legacy Code' (Prentice Hall 2004).

Presentation: "The Ethics of Error-Prevention"

Track: Professional Developer

Time: Wednesday 13:00 - 14:00

Location: Conference Hall 3

Abstract:

Part of being a professional developer is being responsible. We're charged with the task of writing software that is reliable, sturdy, and trustworthy, but we also know that we don't use all of the tools at our disposal. In theory, we could all use a "clean room" process, write tests and extensive preconditions for our code, and choose languages which make errors less likely, but across the industry we don't do any of these things uniformly. Does this mean that the majority of developers are irresponsible, or does it mean that our responsibilities are contextual?

In this talk, we'll look at error-prevention in the short history of our discipline and consider our possible futures.

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