Pete McBreen, Independent Consultant

Pete McBreen is an independent consultant who actually enjoys writing and delivering software, and the author of Software Craftsmanship and Questioning Extreme Programming.

Despite spending a lot of time writing, teaching and mentoring, he does hands-on coding on a live project every year. Pete specializes in finding creative solutions to problems that software developers face.

After many years of working on formal and informal process improvement initiatives, he took a sideways look at the problem and realized, "Software development is meant to be fun. If it isn't, the process is wrong".

Presentation: "Applying Craftsmanship"

Track: Professional Developer

Time: Wednesday 14:30 - 15:30

Location: Conference Hall 3

Abstract:

Since writing the book I have come across many master craftsmen, unfortunately most are not software developers. All have been active in their chosen craft for at least 20 years, some for over 40 years and this has caused me to start asking the question:

What does 20 years of improvement look like?

Craftsmanship is about mastery, and mastery takes time. As humans we would like to think that we can learn things quickly, but the reality is that mastery takes time, a lot of time. The old ideas that come from craftsmanship can be usefully applied to our field of software development, we just need to hink about how to apply those ideas in our current context and environment.

A large part of applying craftsmanship to software development requires us to take a longer term look at what we do, and the context we do it in, but there are some ideas that we can apply that have a more immediate effect.

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