I spent two days recently enjoying being in Cornwall attending and presenting at the first Cornish agile conference Agile on the beach.

The event was a great success with world class speakers (you can see the full list on the website), and an actual beach party on the thursday night with a band (All the fires) and hogroast. The organisation was also superb, co-ordinated by Event cornwall. From the attendee perspective, It was great to meet and talk to such a good turn out of passionate developers and companies.

I have some involvement in the genesis of the event. My dad, Mike Barritt is working for a company called Oxford innovation who are helping companies in cornwall to develop and grow. At some point a while ago, I had connected him with Roger Marlow and suggested that a good way to help everyone get into agile was to host a conference. A year or so later, and I found myself down in cornwall amongst some of the people I have massive respect for in the industry. The event has also had a great sponsorship and support from ThoughtWorks, which makes me really appreciate what an amazing company it is to work for.

Some highlights for me were hearing Mary and Tom Poppendieck talking about Lean Startup and running a value stream mapping workshop, Kevlin Henney reminding us all that software should be FUN, and Jason Gorman firing us up to keep our focus on quality codemanship and staying out of the “Anaerobic” zone when developing code. It was also great to see everyone getting down to the code in a dojo with Jon Jagger, to have the fantastic Rachel Davies helping people with common agile adoption problems, and have Steve Freeman talking about TDD. Quite a line-up!

Unfortunately I couldn’t attend my colleague James Lewis’ talk as we were speaking at the same time, but I have seen the slides and it sounded awesome, so I hope to catch it another day. Parallell to us was Roger so I missed his talk too, but it sounded like he had a good time.

I managed to make a presentation myself, talking through some of the experiences I have had as a consultant working for ThoughtWorks, and in particular some developer practices. I over estimated the amount of material I was trying to get through but did manage to get to a few key points! For those who attended a couple of interesting jump points to follow up might be Martin Fowler on Feature Toggles, gource (the tool at the end), and The continuous delivery book by Jez Humble.

All in all, the event was a great time and I hope that it signifies the beginnings of putting cornwall on the world stage for software development and high tech companies!

Before starting i uninstalled the mono i had already:

#!/bin/sh -x
#This script removes Mono from an OS X System.  It must be run as root
rm -r /Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework
rm -r /Library/Receipts/MonoFramework-SVN.pkg
cd /usr/bin
for i in `ls -al | grep Mono | awk '{print $9}'`; do
rm ${i}
done

First i could search for the mono package by typing

$ port search mono

To begin with this did not show the right version so i did :

$ port selfupdate

This checks for a new version of port and updates its list of available software.

now i see:

coco:~ Jim$ port search mono
mono                           devel/mono     2.0          Implementation of the .NET Development Framework
mono-addins                    devel/mono-addins 0.3          Mono.Addins is a framework for creating extensible applications
monodoc                        devel/monodoc  2.0          Documentation for the Mono .NET Development Framework
monotone                       devel/monotone 0.41         A distributed version control system
mod_mono                       www/mod_mono   1.1.16.1     an Apache plug-in for hosting the Mono System.Web classes
coco:~ Jim$

so all good, i ran

port install mono

but get :

darwin_stop_world.c:307: error: 'ppc_thread_state_t' has no member named '__r31'
make[3]: *** [darwin_stop_world.lo] Error 1
make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

A quick search on google brought this:

http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-tickets/2008-February/005279.html

The instructions here talk about editing this darwin_stop_world.c file and changing some constant values. They give the path to the file for an older version but a bit of ls ing turned up the new folder:

/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_devel_mono/work/mono-2.0/libgc/darwin_stop_world.c

Ok, so now the tricksy bit…

The instructions in the above link talk about some constants not set up correctly. On the line wher ei saw my exception, it was referring to the following bit of code:

#elif defined(POWERPC)
#if defined(_STRUCT_PPC_EXCEPTION_STATE)
	lo = (void*)(state.__r1 - PPC_RED_ZONE_SIZE);

	GC_push_one(state.__r0);
	GC_push_one(state.__r2);
	GC_push_one(state.__r3);
	GC_push_one(state.__r4);
	GC_push_one(state.__r5);
	GC_push_one(state.__r6);
	GC_push_one(state.__r7);
	GC_push_one(state.__r8);
	GC_push_one(state.__r9);
	GC_push_one(state.__r10);
	GC_push_one(state.__r11);
	GC_push_one(state.__r12);
	GC_push_one(state.__r13);
	GC_push_one(state.__r14);
	GC_push_one(state.__r15);
	GC_push_one(state.__r16);
	GC_push_one(state.__r17);
	GC_push_one(state.__r18);
	GC_push_one(state.__r19);
	GC_push_one(state.__r20);
	GC_push_one(state.__r21);
	GC_push_one(state.__r22);
	GC_push_one(state.__r23);
	GC_push_one(state.__r24);
	GC_push_one(state.__r25);
	GC_push_one(state.__r26);
	GC_push_one(state.__r27);
	GC_push_one(state.__r28);
	GC_push_one(state.__r29);
	GC_push_one(state.__r30);
	GC_push_one(state.__r31);
#else

in the post, he seemed to simply remove all the ‘__’ underscores and it worked… so:

	#if defined(_STRUCT_PPC_EXCEPTION_STATE)
		lo = (void*)(state.r1 - PPC_RED_ZONE_SIZE);

		GC_push_one(state.r0);
		GC_push_one(state.r2);
		GC_push_one(state.r3);
		GC_push_one(state.r4);
		GC_push_one(state.r5);
		GC_push_one(state.r6);
		GC_push_one(state.r7);
		GC_push_one(state.r8);
		GC_push_one(state.r9);
		GC_push_one(state.r10);
		GC_push_one(state.r11);
		GC_push_one(state.r12);
		GC_push_one(state.r13);
		GC_push_one(state.r14);
		GC_push_one(state.r15);
		GC_push_one(state.r16);
		GC_push_one(state.r17);
		GC_push_one(state.r18);
		GC_push_one(state.r19);
		GC_push_one(state.r20);
		GC_push_one(state.r21);
		GC_push_one(state.r22);
		GC_push_one(state.r23);
		GC_push_one(state.r24);
		GC_push_one(state.r25);
		GC_push_one(state.r26);
		GC_push_one(state.r27);
		GC_push_one(state.r28);
		GC_push_one(state.r29);
		GC_push_one(state.r30);
		GC_push_one(state.r31);
	#else

This was defined on lines 130 and 273

the second one now looks like :

	
		#if defined(_STRUCT_PPC_EXCEPTION_STATE)
			lo = (void*)(info.r1 - PPC_RED_ZONE_SIZE);
			hi = (ptr_t)FindTopOfStack(info.r1);

			GC_push_one(info.r0);
			GC_push_one(info.r2);
			GC_push_one(info.r3);
			GC_push_one(info.r4);
			GC_push_one(info.r5);
			GC_push_one(info.r6);
			GC_push_one(info.r7);
			GC_push_one(info.r8);
			GC_push_one(info.r9);
			GC_push_one(info.r10);
			GC_push_one(info.r11);
			GC_push_one(info.r12);
			GC_push_one(info.r13);
			GC_push_one(info.r14);
			GC_push_one(info.r15);
			GC_push_one(info.r16);
			GC_push_one(info.r17);
			GC_push_one(info.r18);
			GC_push_one(info.r19);
			GC_push_one(info.r20);
			GC_push_one(info.r21);
			GC_push_one(info.r22);
			GC_push_one(info.r23);
			GC_push_one(info.r24);
			GC_push_one(info.r25);
			GC_push_one(info.r26);
			GC_push_one(info.r27);
			GC_push_one(info.r28);
			GC_push_one(info.r29);
			GC_push_one(info.r30);
			GC_push_one(info.r31);
		#else
	

Watch out for the top of stack one! its an extra one.

ok this works!

I had to restart the terminal because it didnt seem to find the new programs – it still thought mcs lived in /usr/bin not /opt/local/bin which is where port puts it.

Now i can compile c# version 3.0!!

oh yeah, be sure to use gmcs to compile, not mcs which is the old one.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/08/scaling_agile_development_poll_200810/

enjoy.

Whilst retrospectives should really come out with very specific achievable and measurable actions, these more general themes can also be useful.

One of the team, Jeremy started writing the basics of the actions on cards as statements, like “Challenge Requirements”. We put these “mantras” on the wall and so we can see them and sometimes refer to them during standups.

This Iteration we did the same thing and it seemed to be a good way of capturing and making visible a result of our retrospective.

So far we have :

• Challenge requirements
• Understand Story Intention
• Challenge the spike
• Its not over until UAT (User acceptance testing or signoff)
• Keep stories focused and SIMPLE
• Migration code will ALWAYS be used again
• Transfer ownership (of stories, if people leave or move teams)
• Share Knowledge (as people roll off the project)
• Is it releasable? (an individual story)
• Demo Early

I gave a presentation at TW last thursday last month (August).

The subject was Collective design.

There was some interesting discussion about design in general.

For now, the slides can be seen here:

Collective design presentation

Abstract:
Software development implicitly creates a software “design”, the shape of the software artifact. To build software requires people. This talk discusses how the design of software is affected by and communicated between software developers, particularly on projects involving many people.

finally over the lag and just have the retrospective to go.

today heaps of balloons in the office with everyones name on them!

Some great discussions and ideas.

An analogy for interaction with the clients – like swimming in a rip tide – you cant swim against it.

Building relationships is like building a fire.

This is very cool as I was beginning before I came to start to focus on these as important concepts.

Discussing with Patrick my coach he pointed me to this book:

Collaboration Explained

Of course there is always someone who has been there before and written about it:)

Also I discovered the blogs.thoughtworks.com blog aggregator and so have added it to my links page.

In particular, this entry From Sam Newman is relevant A Tech Lead Manifesto

so far so good – not going to put any spoilers on here but there was plenty of interaction and collaboration going on. Think its a really positive experience, even if you only consider the fact that we are visiting our office out here in pune – aswell as us getting a feel for whats happening on the ground here, we ar egetting to know people and also i imagine its good fun for them to have lots of people from all over the place arriving.

the office is very spacious and has heaps going on – there is a kind of table tennis and karam league going on so have signed up for that.

everyone on immersion is very freindly and looks like a great week ahead!

its also really good to have time to think away from a project and in an inspiring environment – have a few ideas which may or may not get implemented!

will post photos at some point

Basically I like the idea of lots of simple rules or individuals with simple behaviour creating very complex responses and behaviour as a whole which is unexpected. It just feels like the right way to think about things. Its intuitive and it might just help in some way for us to deal with the things that we need to deal with if we would like to be still around on our nice planet in 100 years time.