Dreamfeed

I’ll be offering a new course eXperience Refactoring, together with Willem van den Ende and Rob Westgeest. We’ve been playing with the idea of designing a hands-on course for some time. With some pressure from clients, we finally decided to go for it

It is a two day course about the ins and out of refactoring software, in a responsible and cost effective way. The first public appearance will be on 4 and 5 March, 2008, near Eindhoven (The Netherlands).

In this quite unique course, you will learn how to improve the design of existing software step by step, while continuing to deliver value to your customers. It’s a very practical, hands-on course: we don’t think you will get very far by just hearing and reading about refactoring, so our approach is to let you learn by doing, practicing, and receiving feedback.

The course provides approaches and techniques to work more effectively with legacy software and to prevent new software from turning into a mess. We cover topics like code and design smells and breaking dependencies to get your tests in; we’ve also added a bit of systems thinking to help you see design debt and refactoring in an organizational context.

Check out the course page for a full description and information on how to join - don’t wait too long: we only have a limited amount of places.

Picture credits: Look what I have done! © by Elsie esq.

After quite a few hours of hard work, Willem and I have finished our whitepaper on the Promise is Debt pattern (PDF, in Dutch). We frequently encounter this pattern in IT organisations: it’s a common destructive pattern of behaviour, where people overpromise to compensate for underdelivery; they fail to live up to the expectations, and then overpromise some more again…

We apply systems thinking and diagrams of effects to get a grip on the underlying dynamics and we identify a number of leverage points to break the vicious cycle.

The whitepaper is currently only available in Dutch. We intend to create an English version as well.