Discovering Startling Things from Your Version Control System

Monday 11th April, 6:30 pm.

Speaker: Michael Feathers, Chief Scientist at Obtiva Corporation.

Room 4.31 (fourth floor), University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB - map (click on Informatics Forum in the list of buildings).

Synopsis

The industry is awash in an epidemic of bad code. We all know what bad code looks like - it's opaque and impenetrable. But, we spend little time trying to figure out how it got that way. We assume it's tight schedules or lack of discipline, but perhaps there's more.

In this talk, Michael Feathers will relate several things that he's learned by taking a longitudinal view of a system - by issuing queries of a code base and relating the results back to events on a team. The more we know about how we behave as teams in our code, the more likely we are to be able to control our development well enough to hold bad code at bay.

About the speaker

Michael is internationally respected, an active leader in the Agile community, and an insightful, visionary thinker. He's a regular presenter at conferences around the world, a published author, and an all-around great guy. His passions include working to solve problems in large legacy code bases and connecting with what makes developing software fun and enriching.