I have been home a week a so and had time to have a think about it. This was no doubt a partner conference, it was not targeted at the average developer in the street wanting to know what Typemock Isolator was used for, but at companies operating, usually a consultancy role, promoting best practice to their clients. This makes for a different vi
be to other conferences, the conversation soon drifts to general best practice and people’s view of our industry as a whole. This was in fact the core of the panel discussion I did with ‘Uncle’ Bob Martin and Roy Osherove.
It is interesting to note that the problems I see in UK are just the same across the world. We have an industry that is divided in two between those keen on self-improvement, a craftsman approach, using emergent best practices ,who are up with what is new in the industry; and those who see development as just a job, who only learn new bits when they have to, usually only on a training course.
So why at conferences like this do we keep coming back to this question of how to engage the group of people who are not interested in self-improvement, and not make much progress? I assume that it is because those of us who are keen to improve ourselves and our industry, and I would include all at this conference in that, want to promote this good practice to as many people as they can and are infuriated at the progress they are making.
Using the right tools can make a huge different in how easy it is engage people in best practice. You need to be able to show that using a tool or practice will not just improve the quality of their code, but also make their life easier, make them more productive. This can be particularly true in the area of SharePoint where I spend much of my time. Using Typemock Isolator can make a big difference, not only to enable testing, but also to reduce the build/deploy/view cycle. This is not the obvious use of the product. However, for a SharePoint developer this alternative use hits all the right places, it make their life easier, more productive and I think improves code quality.
So let us see more conferences like this, spreading the word on the ways we have all addressed the issues that plague us day to day, so we can improve our practices together.
