I’ll be giving two talks at ESDC, both on Wednesday March 3rd. I start the day bright and early with #605 Going Lean: Slash Waste with Build & Deployment Automation at 8:15 am, and finish the day at 4 pm with #906 Creating Habitable Code: Lessons in Longevity from CruiseControl. Lean software development has been a hot topic for me lately, as members of BayXP and the Silicon Valley Agile Meetup should know, while practices for creating long-term sustainable code has been a long term sustained interest. I’ve delivered the Habitable Code talk before but this’ll be the first time doing it solo, without Paul Julius by my side.

What was this? Some of the comments were lame. No code comments???? Typing speed tests for developers? Sounds like a work culture I would not want to be involved in. Gold stars? Social rewards?! This sounds like grade school practices! As a software manager, I do what I can to avoid this nonsense. This was the only session of SD2008 for which I had negative comments. Very little content here.

With the other comments offering to sooth my ego — “Excellent presentation, I wish every member of my team could have attended” and “Great information, much more than expected” among the most gracious — I have the luxury of equanimity when considering this negative feedback.

The result is that I’m very grateful to this commenter for reminding me of the dissenting voices, the ones I mostly don’t get to hear.

In my daily life most interactions are with people who think very similar thoughts and our disagreements are largely trivial. It’s easy to forget that we’re still the minority. Agile has certainly crossed the chasm, but while we’re working our way through the early majority there’s many more people out there unconvinced and unimpressed. (… or maybe just uninformed? Last night at the Santa Cruz iPhone Developers meetup I met an experienced programmer who had literally never heard of big-A Agile software development.)

In the big echo chamber of the Agile community I sometimes find myself losing interest, for lots of reasons. We seem really good at spending a lot of words to capture subtle differences in technique. If someone tells me they “do Agile” I have no idea what they mean any more. Doesn’t “agile” just mean “do good things” now?

So I thank this Lone Dissenter. I needed his reminder of just how different the world can be.

My interest in topics like continuous integration, developer testing and mundane excellence have the common thread of “how do we maximize our sustainable (and sustained) velocity?” All too often I’ve worked with teams who find their velocity (and their sanity!) suffering because their codebase has grown beyond unwieldy into unlivable. These seems especially common on projects that are long lived, have large teams, or long lived projects with large teams — the common denominator really being the code passing through many hands.

Paul and I think CruiseControl provides an interesting study here because it is a long lived project that has had over 200 successful contributors. The patterns and practices that enabled this would help many of the projects I’ve seen.

(If you’re interested in SDBP but aren’t registered, this a gentle reminder that Early Registration ends this Friday.)