So, the date is fixed, we’ll be meeting on Thursday 30 July at the Lamb and Flag from 8pm to talk about testing and how testers fit into an agile project. The starting point for discussions will be Agile Testing by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory. As usual, it is not necessary to read the book, although a passing knowledge of the subject might help!

You may have noticed that the group has been rather quiet for the last few months. I was hoping that someone else would volunteer to run it. But no-one did. So I sulked.

But now I have a book sitting on my desk that I’d like to read, but I need a push to get started. So maybe we could wake the group from its sleep to cover this? It is Agile Testing by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory. Ideally I’d like to discuss this in the first week of August. Anyone else interested? UPDATE: Let’s pencil in Thursday 30 July!

We’ll be discussing the topics in Kent Beck’s Implementation Patterns at the Lamb and Flag from 8pm on 10 February 2009.

Our meeting on Tuesday 13 January will be a new year social event, since not much reading has taken place over the Christmas break. As usual, it’ll be at the Lamb and Flag from 8pm.

We will be meeting from 8pm on 9 December at the Lamb and Flag to discuss Legacy Code and Testing. The starting point for discussions will be the book Working Effectively with Legacy Code. Come along if you are just interested in the subject and have not read the book, or if you have war stories about taming a legacy system.

Our next meeting will be at 8pm on Tuesday 8 April 2008 at the Lamb and Flag to discuss The Pragmatic Programmer by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt. I won’t personally be there (too busy being on holiday in Spain), but I’m hoping for a bigger turn out than the March meeting which was a bit of a wash out. I’ll be there in spirit and I do have a copy of this classic book to take away with me and re-read. I’ll add my comments to the blog after the event.

Our next meeting will be at 8pm on 11 March 2008 at the Lamb and Flag to discuss our progress with Erlang. Hopefully we will have found a decent problem to solve or found an open source project that we can get involved in. Learning a language in a vacuum is tricky from a motivation point of view.

For those who are coming to it new, we are mostly working through Joe Armstrong’s book “Programming Erlang”.

See you then!

Our next meeting will be at 8pm on 12 Febuary 2007 at the Lamb and Flag to discuss “Beautiful Code” edited by Andy Oram. As I always say, you don’t need to have read the book to come and join in. You just need to have some views on the art of software development and in this case, some sense of aesthetics.

Our next meeting will be at 8pm on 8 January 2007 at the Lamb and Flag to discuss how we are progressing in our attempts to learn Erlang. We are generally working our way through Joe Armstrong’s recent book, with an eye on either contributing to an open source project, or starting one ourselves.

All welcome, but you’ll need to know the password which is “Hello Joe. Hello Mike“.