On Wednesday Tieturi organized a mini seminar on Agile and embedded in Helsinki, Finland. The seminar had 3 talks. First Pentti Virtanen gave a general background introduction to agile development. This was pretty much your average pure vanilla intro to agile -type presentation. The second part by Tomi Juhola was titled agile embedded in practice. I had high hopes for this as I though I would actually get to hear some new concrete stories from other Finnish companies practicing agile development. Well, it turned out that the cases presented were first the nice work of Nancy Van Schooenderwoert, and the second Jeff Sutherlands PatientKeeper. No new evidence there. The last talk by Teppo Heikurinen was about testing in agile development. The main topic seemed to be TDD. I have realized that TDD is not so much about testing, but more about design. There was some critique from audience that TDD is just like testing your own work and it has known problems. Yes in that sense it does, but TDD is a design practice which just happens to have a positive side effect of providing the safety net in a form of automated regression tests. At least this is my current understanding. This point was totally left out. Automated acceptance testing was mentioned, but that's about it. Other thing was that the value of TDD was verified with case studies from mainstream programming. I think the biggest issue is to convince the embedded crowd with studies from their own field, since basically people believe that agile has value but are not sure if it can be applied to their domain. Teppo mentioned that there are no studies from embedded and TDD, but Nancy's work is just that! I guess he forgot his colleagues presentation.
The room was full with 60+ listeners, so there is interest towards agile and embedded. I think a lot of people present were not practicing but more curious about what is all that buzz around agile and whether these methods are applicable to embedded (firmware) software development. I hope the event increased the interest even further and in the near future we would get more stories from Finnish companies practicing agile and embedded. It's nice to notice that Tieturi is taking a strong role in promoting these methods for embedded as well.
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