Keynote: Ralph Johnson on Living and working with aging software
The final keynote of the conference kicked off the second day of QCon and presented to us by Ralph Johnson of the Gang of Four fame and whose students contributed to Fowler’s timeless Refactoring book.

Ralph was asking about the number of people who work on systems they created (versus systems that other created) and then argued about the meaning of maintenance programmer arguing for software evolutionists instead. Whilst I agree that no one likes to be labelled a maintenance programmer, changing the name doesn’t really matter.

I like the different perspectives that Ralph brought. He talked about Software Capital as about truly understanding how the software works. Code is one example of this, but actually there are many other things that go into understanding how the software works. He argues that the right sort of documentation (and other artefacts) that helps understand how the software works is another part of Software Capital. As a result, you also need the people around the software to help keep the story alive.

My observations of various organisations also backs up some of the things that he says such as, the larger a system gets, the more likely you need some form of documentation and social structure around the software.

I think a lot of people didn’t like Ralph’s keynote because he talked about refactoring as if it was a new idea and, unfortunately this audience is one that has been exposed to these ideas for a long time.

Track: Beyond Tools and Technologies
I spent the rest of my time on the track that I was speaking at later that day. The first talk of the day was Martin Fowler whose talk, “What are we programming for?” brought the tiny room to a stand still. The room was so full (although it was a small room) that they had to turn people away.

WhatAreWeProgrammingFor

Martin used the talk to highlight the importance of going beyond acting like hired guns and actually thinking about how to use the skills for something good. He asked people to consider the essence of the firms that they work for and whether or not they are benefiting humanity.

Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks’ CTO then talked about the importance of team diversity in her talk, “How to avoid ‘We never even thought of that’!” She talked about the role that diversity played in creating innovations in science and how too much of the “sameness” creates problems with creating too many assumptions. I like the idea of a balancing tradeoffs of not enough diversity leading to problems in teams and too much diversity to the point that the team don’t share the same vocabulary.

After the lunch break, I ran my session, “Building the next generation of Technical Leaders“. I was very happy with the turnout and had some great feedback from the participants. It’s an issues I think is sorely neglected in our industry and has a huge impact on the team effectiveness.

The next session was run by our Director of Social Engagement (Jeff Wishnie) and Merrick Schaefer of Unicef discussing the importance that technology has on developing countries and the significant impact it can have on the lives. They talked about the Rapid FTR project that is being developed to help capture information about children who’ve been separated from their parents with hope of quickly reconnecting them, and at worst, giving them legal status by registering them with an agency such as Unicef.

The final session of the day rounded out with Mick Blowfield with a presentation titled, “IT in a Low Carbon Future“.

Whilst there were many other potentially interesting sessions, I was really happy to hear about the issues that go beyond just Tools and Technology.