Speaker

Ward Cunningham
Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.

Ward Cunningham is a founder of Cunning-ham & Cunningham, Inc. He has also served as director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as principal engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory. Ward is well known for his contributions to the developing practice of object-oriented programming, the variation called Extreme Programming, the communities hosted by his WikiWikiWeb, and the 'fit' approach to specification and test.

Presentation: "We Should Be Good At This"

Wednesday 11:00 - 11:45, Conference Hall

Sometimes methodologists must stop accumulating practices and instead reduce their advice to very simple terms. This is how we make way for innovation. Here is one such reduction I was driven to by whining on the agile-testing list: * A program is a specification of operations to be done in the future. Programming is the process of reasoning about such specifications. Programmers reason about the future. Programmers should be good at this.

* It is possible to glimpse the future by running a program in a variety of ways. An artful choice of ways leads to more valuable glimpses than dull ways. Testers should be good at this.

* The purchase of a program is an investment in the future. The wise investor seeks the best information available from all sources but recognizes that there is an element of speculation in every choice. Customers should be good at this.

In this talk I will examine each of these assertions, defend them from my own experience, contrast that with experience related by others, and then engage the audience in a semi-structured dialog on how, in their experience, agile methods might aid or inhibit the competence these bullets demands.