Saturday Sept 10The Brewery

Chiswell StreetLondon EC1Y 4SD

Phone #: 020 7638 8811

Europe Away Day 2011

GermanyUnited Kingdom

Please use the following hash tags while tweeting about this event # TWEUAwayDay#mytw

Guest Speaker

Ladies & Gentlemen,

At last we're here!

Welcome to the ThoughtWorks Europe Away Day 2011. What a special event this is going to be!

This gathering represents a key event in the building of our ThoughtWorks EU ThoughtWorker community. It provides the opportunity to reconnect with TWers you haven’t seen in years, meet TWers who have joined us since our last Away Day, learn and share on a number of highly relevant subjects, and of course to have some fun! We have lined up a bunch of exciting talks on various topics of interest for you. The food menu is mouth watering too!

At any point in time please do not hesitate to reach out to anyone in the volunteering team, in case you have any queries or ideas!

Once the event is over we plan to send out a note asking for feedback on the event. We would use this feedback in making the next EU Away Day all the more fun!

We really hope that you enjoy partaking in this event. Lets raise a toast to peace, love, harmonies and of course, a whole lot of fun! Here’s to a rocking TWEU Away Day 2011

Regards,

EU Away Day Organizers

Ben is a best-selling author, broadcaster, medical doctor and academic who specializes in unpicking dodgy scientific claims from drug companies, newspapers, government reports, PR people and quacks. Unpicking bad science is the best way to explain good science. He also writes on why clever people believe stupid things.

“Bad Science” (4th Estate) has sold over 280,000 copies, is published in 18 countries, and reached #1 in the UK paperback non-fiction charts. His book exposing bad behaviour in the pharmaceutical industry will be published in 2012 by 4th Estate.

Ben has written the weekly Bad Science column in the Guardian since 2003. It’s archived on this site along with blogposts, columns for the British Medical Journal, and other writing.

The Placebo Effect is a two-part documentary series he made for BBC Radio 4. The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists is another. He’s appeared on the Today programme lots of times, Any Questions, Newsnight, Start The Week, The Now Show, Loose Ends, PM, Quote Unquote, Watchdog, and various other things.

He has given over 250 talks in the past 5 years, from comedy clubs and music festivals to universities and schools, government departments, and more. He’s received lots of awards for writing, and a few honorary doctorates. He was trained in medicine in Oxford and London. Ben is 36 and currently works full time as an academic in epidemiology. He does not see private patients.

Welcome to ThoughtWorks Europe Away Day 2011.

Ben Goldacre

Roy Singham Talk

Afternoon Tea

Drinking/ Partners arrive

Guest Speaker - Ben Goldacre

Dinner, Drinks & Dancing !!!

Lunch

Please note that snacks & refreshments will be provided at the break.

GreenJames Watt

StreamRoom

PinkQueens Vault

PurpleKings Vault

YellowQueen Charlotte

BlueUpper Sugar

RedLower Sugar

11:15 - 11:55

12:00 - 12:40

12:45 - 13:25

14:40 - 15:20

15:25 - 16:05

Volunteering - Why bother?- Stuart Hogg

The Mythical EnterpriseArchitect - Erik Doernenburg

Javascript on JVM experiences - Dan Moore

What are these Studios toolsyou speak of - Vladimir Sneblic

Working with large clients - Dilraj Aujla

Relative sizing with apples,chickoos, raspberries,jackfruit and watermelon - JK Werner

From push to pull - Enablingcollaboration on TW websites- Andrew Yates

Towards Smaller,Towards Simpler – Micro Applications and the eventually consistent Enterprise - James Lewis

Lightning talks - IncludingRhino + logging - Felix Leipold

Event sourced CQRS - Architecture of the Gods- Ben Butler Cole

Architecture for Continuous Delivery - Sam Newman

Effective feedback- Akash Bhalla

Systems thinkingthrough play- Patrick Kua

Bollywood choreographytrends that have caughtmy attention over the years- Deepali Thanki

Using Iron Ruby to Test .NET Applications - Peter Gillard-Moss

Art of Persuasion - Umar Akhter Exploring common challenges faced by organizations that want to “Go Agile” - Brett Ansley

Facilitation 101 - Dennise Openshaw

Building delivery capabilities - Patric Fornasier

Getting beyond good enough - A user goal based framework for Agile delivery - Darius Kumana (50 minutes)

Managing Scope - Polite but firm - Luke Barrett

Experience Design - Marc McNeill

What about the team and organi-zational side of Continuous Delivery - Kief Morris

Lightning Talks - Peter Gillard Moss

Thinking outside trodden paths - Wolf Schlegel

Where Exploration & Automation meet: Getting the most from Automated Functional Tests - Andrew Kemp

Where is my f** revolution? What do I want to revolutionise anyway? - Felix Leipold

Lessons learnt using NoSQL + Scala on TW projects - Mark Johnson, Liz Douglass & Daniel Abel

Native or web? With NetMash you can have both - Duncan Beaumont Cragg

Scala vs Clojure - Springer content Ingestion - Mark Needham & Uday Rayala

08:30 - 09:3009:30 - 10:30

11:00 - 11:15

BreakfastTWEU Update : Luke

Morning Tea

Lunch13:25 - 14:25

16:05 - 16:30

16:40 - 17:25

17:45 - 18:30

18:30 - 19:15

19:15 - 20:30

Schedule

Speakers

Stuart Hogg

Andrew Yates

Akash Bhalla

Patrick Kua

Deepali Thanki

Erik Doernenburg

James Lewis

Felix Leipold

Ben Butler Cole

Sam Newman

Dan Moore

Peter Gillard-Moss

Marc Johnson, Liz Douglass, Daniel Abel

Duncan Beaumont Cragg

Mark Needham & Uday Rayala

Vladimir Sneblic

Umar Akhter

Wolf Schlegel

Andrew Kemp

Felix Leipold

Dilraj Aujla

Brett Ansley

Patric Fornasier

Kief Morris

Peter Gillard-Moss

JK Werner

Dennise Openshaw

Darius Kumana

Luke Barrett

Marc McNeill

Topic

Volunteering - Why bother?

From Push To Pull - Enabling collaboration on TW websites

Effective feedback

Systems thinking through play

Bollywood choreography trends that have caught my attention over the years

The Mythical Enterprise Architect

Towards Smaller, Towards Simpler - Micro Applications & the eventually consistent Enterprise

Lightning talks - including Rhino + logging

Event sourced CQRS - Architecture of the Gods

Architecture for Continuous Delivery

Javascript on JVM experiences

Using Iron Ruby to test .NET applications

Lessons learnt using NoSQL + Scala on TW projects

Native or web? With NetMash you can have both

Scala vs Clojure - Springer content ingestion

What are these Studios tools you speak of?

Art of Persuasion

Thinking outside trodden paths

Where exploration And automation meet: Getting the most from automated functional tests

Where is my f*** revolution? What do I want to revolutionise anyway?

Working with large clients

Explore common challenges faced by organisations that want to "Go Agile"

Building delivery capabilities

What about the team and organisational side of Continuous Delivery?

Lightning talks

Relative sizing with apples, chickoos,raspberries, jackfruit and watermelon

Facilitation 101

Getting beyond good enough - A user goal based framework for Agile delivery

Managing Scope - Polite but firm

Experience Design

Blurb

With the relentless pace of work and the desire to have some semblance of family/friendship life can we, should we, strive to embed a third pillar (volunteering) into our otherwise hectic lives. Charity may begin at home but does it have to stop there?

Where the current site has come from : A quick tour of ThoughtWorks previous sites. Target personas and messaging. Increasing the internal user base. Aggregation, curation, syndication, blogs, microsites & social media.

A popular session at TWU that covers 4 main areas - typical, unaffective feedback, patterns (what, why, when) of good feedback, anti-patterns, and possibly a meta-feedback session at the end if time permits.

Ever wonder why people behave the way they do and it seems just plain wrong? Systems thinking is a powerful way of analysing situations and developing more effective solutions. It's hard to develop the understanding of systems thinking and even harder to explain it. So why explain it when we can experience some of it for ourselves? I'd like to run through exercises from the Systems Thinking Playbook and help people develop their own understanding of Systems Thinking.

It will be a toungue in cheek look at some of the choreography trends that I've seen in Bollywood since I was a kid. From heavy duty PT (aerobics like) dancing with battalions of background dancers wearing garish costumes to the mandatory but unbelievable Switzerland song with the heroine wearing a chiffon saree. The content will be presented in Pecha Kucha style

Do you sometimes wonder what Enterprise Architects actually do? That is, other than sitting together in an ivory tower hatching evil multi-year plans to build the most absurd technical solutions? Over the years I had a fair share of interaction with these centralised groups. Based on that I've got some ideas of what they're trying to do, and even better, some more ideas on how to actually achieve it.

This is about the trend towards micro-apps and micro-architectures with a bit of SOA thrown in as well.

Will include a variety of topics. Strictly limited to 8 mins

There is an architecture that helps keep your domain model beautiful; that saves you from the pain of schema migration; that allows your application to capture its users' intent; that promotes screamingly fast performance; that allows you to deploy some extremely trendy tech. Sadly it doesn't function well as either a floor polish or dessert topping. I'm going to discuss a combination of CQRS with Event Sourcing which results in a particularly pleasant set of architectural properties. It's widely applicable to the kinds of application we write every day and it could make you a happier developer.

There are a lot of conversations about how DevOps-related automation helps speed delivery to production. This presentation focuses on one approach to architecture that can be a significant enabler to Continuous Delivery. Building on experience (some good, some bad!) from multiple ThoughtWorks projects where we have used services to deliver software, this presentation discusses: How to use analysis of the business domain to model services? How services and teams relate (should each service be owned by one team? What happens if you have more teams than services?) When should you create a service? How to you handle service dependencies in build pipelines ? How to handle service end-point versioning? How services let you go "from laptop to live" in 71 minutes

To share experiences from a recent web project : Sharing code client and server side for reuse; using jquery on server side to transform pure-html pages instead of using templates. Would like to draw out other peoples server-side javascript experiences.

I've been using IronRuby to test dotnet apps. How cool is that? Wouldn't you like to know how to do it? Then I'll tell you and give you some warnings and cool tricks with it.

Having now used Scala and MongoDB in the wild on a number of production projects, we can start to share our experiences, stories and learning.We've gained some productivity and we'll share what things have worked in achieving these gains. We've also encountered some challenges and pitfalls along the way and we'll share what these are and how wechanged our approach and recovered.

The NetMash Android app framework is "Apps Without Boundaries"; a simple but delicious blend of Native and Web. if you are interested in learning Android Java and are about to start a simple app for that if you have got an idea and are about to write an Android app for it if you need to prototype an Android app for a TW client or prospect if you would like to get together with others to work on a Good Cause Android app and you are happy to try new things and learn new approaches .. and take a little risk... .. then why not consider doing it via NetMash? Come along with your app ideas and I'll show you how we can make them real, and boundless!

One of the pieces of work at Springer involves writing an ingestion engine to import 5 million XML documents into a Mark Logic database. The version we're using on the project is written in Scala but Uday/Mark wrote another version in Clojure in their spare time to see the difference between them. In this talk we'll cover the differences between the two versions and where we see each language being better. We'll look at Design approach of the solution, Writing DSLs, Performance, Testing

A (slightly biased) look at Mingle, Twist and Go, meant as a refresher/info session for people who have not seen these tools in a while. As a mainly PS focused group we are in a challenging situation where: clients expect us to recommend the best tool for project management/CI & CD/acceptance testing/collaboration you're constantly pestered by the Studios team for not considering/recommending their tool So, lets have a quick demo of the latest features of each of these tools and an open discussion about what they are good for and how they are different from the main competitors.

After having played a variety of roles, right from jumping into our family business at the age of 16 to having spent 13 years in the software industry, and then starting another successful business venture, I have come to believe that the single largest factor that accounts for success lies in our ability to get the best out of people around us. In this session I will share some of my real life experiences, and the "Science" behind the "Art of Persuasion"

This session introduces a few techniques and tools for thinking outside the box. The session is based on a workshop run by David Harvey at this year's SPA conference. Techniques are briefly explained and then explored in exercises.

Agile teams invest heavily in automated functional tests. When done well, this investment is paid back with fast feedback enabling teams to release software quickly and often. By structuring tests in the right way, teams can further leverage this investment by using these tests as a platform for exploratory testing that could find issues a regression test suite won't. This talk will cover the process and cost benefits of creating automated tests that can be reused to support exploratory testing. Concepts and practices will be described within the context of a mature agile delivery team. It will provide an overview of current practices for automated functional and exploratory testing within agile teams. The main focus of the talk will be to provide an overview and demonstration of techniques that will allow testers to utilise existing automated functional tests to support exploratory testing. The benefits of this approach such as; reducing the time needed for exploratory testing, increasing exploratory testing coverage, improved repeatability when reproducing bugs and improved robustness of your automated functional regression tests will be reviewed.

The magic Year 2010 has come and gone and still the world of IT is the same. This talk and discussion is about what we as well-rounded software professionals want to achieve. Do we really want to help mediocre organisations to deliver mediocre projects in a predictable fashion? Or do we not rather want to strive for delivering outstanding applications at high speed to successful businesses (perhaps taking more responsibility for the operations side of things)? Hitherto I will challenge a few conventional wisdoms (J2EE bad Servlet container ok) and agile beliefs (just write enough unit tests and everything is gonna be tickety boo) and present a few ideas on where application development should go for people to discuss violently

If you have wondered why we take on work with organisations which appear unaligned, where cultures clash, or just want a forum to say your piece on the big companies then this will be session to get some CP therapy.

A workshop to explore some of the common challenges we face within organisations that want to adopt Agile and some solutions that might help us overcome these.

I'd like to share some of my recent experiences with building up a TWU and TW delivery team. What worked well and what didn't. How we capitalised on using new technology, etc.

We love to talk about the technology aspects of Continous Delivery - Chef vs. Puppet, whether Maven fits into CD (no, no it doesn't), cloud, etc., etc. But beyond happy fuzzy sentiments that developers and operations people should love and cherish each other, and broad simplistic decalarations that operations people are unnecessary since any developer worth their salt is easily able to install a web server, how should people be organized to make Continuous Delivery work? Is having a Build Monkey an anti-pattern? Is setting up a DevOps Team completely missing the point? How should ThoughtWorks be setting up project teams with our clients to implement Continuous Delivery most effectively?

Lightning talks

Value of introducing the process in an abstract example first. This talk covers the exercise that we did at JPMC and some of the unexpected examples that came out of it possibly covering why we should stop saying estimate

This is not about Inceptions or Quickstarts but facilitation basics. How do you get ideas from people in a workshop setting?How do you "unstick" a workshop session without influencing the outcomes?How do you control the dominant types and get input from the the meeker participants? Facilitation is not a natural skill for everyone but it is something that you can learn some simple "tricks" for to make it easier to be more effective

Often the focus is on developer throughput and misses the overall value proposition of the software from the perspective of the end-user. My talk introduces a user-goal based framework for setting up and managing agile projects for success. It introduces an approach to Goal-Driven Development that allows stakeholders/Product Owners to take a user-centered approach to delivery from requirements capture, through planning and into development to deliver software that delights the user. A Few Of The Key Concepts From The Talk: Setting-Up Projects For Success,Minimal Viable Product,User-Test Driven Development,Goal Burn-Down,Experience Refactoring,Helping Teams Get Beyond "Good Enough"

It's generally accepted that scope management is an important aspect of delivering a successful project. But all too easily it can become a wearing and highly adversarial conversation with the business - how many times can you batter the business with the challenging reality of what it may well take to deliver their dream product / service? This session would look at ways to manage scope while still maintaining a strong and positive relationship with the business

I'd like to talk about experience design & possibly have an interactive session

Session Descriptions

Food Menu

Arrival Breakfast Menu (8:30 - 9:35):

Tea and Coffee served with kiwi, apple and lime smoothie.Organic carrot and blood orange presse.Marmite costini.Apple granola Danish.New season rhubarb Danish

Tea/Coffee (11:00 - 11:15)

Lunch Menu (13:25 - 14:30):

Beetroot, fennel and ginger with fresh corianderOrganic honey roasted sweet potato with cilantro and lime crispy noodle saladOrganic envide with sultanas, sweet corn and soya beansRoasted chicken and mango salad with chestnuts and toasted coconutSmoked salmon on wild rocket with New Cross goats cheeseStir-fried broccoli salad in smoked paprika, curied aioli and mini poppadumsColley in garden pea and tarragon cream sauceEnglish farmed green bean warm salad, with poached pak choi and heritage elongated beetrootHoney baked sweet potato stuffed with herbed goat's cheeseMinted cous cous with caramelized carrots, sultanas, apricots and plumsOven roasted free range chicken, with butter poached leek hearts, and a spinach greened sauceSlow-cooked spring lamb with kumquats, escalot onions and celerySteamed new potatos in English butter and parsleyBlood orange and passlon fruit mousseSeasonal apple, blackberry and chocolate strudelVanilla cheesecake with summer berry compote

Afternoon Break (16:05 - 16:30):

Fruit and sunflower seed granola cookiesGourmet chocolate chunksRye biscuits with honey and strawberry PhiladelphiaServed with tea & coffee

Buffet Dinner Menu (19:35 - 20:30):

SaladsRoasted root vegetables, thyme infused blossom honey, pickled kohlrabi, citrus mayonnaiseWalnut, pear, endive and stilton, prawn crackers, ash biscuitBeetroot, apple, pickled carrot, feta cheese, raspberry vinaigretteHam hock, cherry tomatoes, pickled sultanas, roasted sweet potatoScottish hot smoked salmon, new potatoes, endamame beans, kalamati olivesBaby gems, parsnip crisps, crystallised pineapple, crispy bacon, ceasar dressingMain CourseSlow roasted daube of beef, chestnut mushroomsFree range Norfolk chicken and rice pie, wild mushroomsTeriyaki glazed freedom salmon, egg noodles. spinachRoasted seasonal vegetablesCeleriac gratin, cheese sauceWholegrain mustard Duke of York mashDessertsVictorian peach cake, English custard, cinnamon sugarBakewell tartWhite chocolate, champagne and pistachio mousse

Please feel free to reach out to the following people in case you have any queries.

Angela Ashworth : +44 (0) 7768415884Kirsty Day : +44 (0) 7912679396Liz Douglass : +44 (0) 7549945159

Angela Ashworth Elif Pratt Harinee Muralinath

Kirsty Day Liz DouglassLouisa Marshall

Rajiv Mathew Reshma Shaikh Shweta Nayak

Dharani KumarIlias Bartolini Richard Morris

Tom Duckering (aka DJ Duck)

ThoughtWorks Organizing Committee

Photographers

Disc Jockey