Software Quality Days 2013

SQD took place in Vienna from January 15 to 17 2013. My first impressions where: Scrum is everywhere and open source does not play a major role.

Most people I have met came from rather large organizations. They mostly face different problems than us: running one large project with multiple teams. We instead have one development team running multiple projects.

However, the topics at the conference where not too far off: we at gocept are building high quality software, too.

• Andrea Provaglio (@andreaprovaglio) talked about Overcoming Self-organization Blocks in Agile Teams: why do we need self-organization, how can it be enabled and what can prevent it.
• In contrast to Andrea Provaglio, who says that software was intangible, Tom Gilb (@imtomgilb) has a completely different opinion: since you can quantify anything (including software), it cannot be intangible. In his talk Quality Quantification for Quality Engineering he stated that all quality requirements need to be quantified (actually he states this for years now). When you actually what to verify if a certain quality level was reached (or not) you must quantify it.
• Sander Hoogendoorn (@aahoogendoorn) talked about agile anti-patterns, like “Dogmagile”, “Crusader Agile”, “Scrumdementalism” and others. His views pretty much match mine: don’t be dogmatic, do what works.
• Professional speaker Herman Scherer (@hermannscherer) held his talk Jenseits vom Mittelmaß. It is roughly about being competitive in today’s environment. Very inspiring.
• On the bad side there was Rainer Stropek’s talk about Monitoring and Root Cause Analysis in Dynamic Cloud Infrastructures. While there was some truth in it, it was extremely high level and basically a road show for Microsoft Azure: #fail.

The conference itself was well organized. The call for papers for the SQD2014 is open until May, 31 2013. Maybe next time we can put in a breeze of small business and open-source.