This year I’ll be running two 1-day workshops at NDC Oslo:

Behaviour-Driven Development

Have you ever wanted to know exactly what your customers want? Or helped them to clarify their requirements? Have you ever wanted to quickly pick up a new domain, or prove that the application behaves as expected?

BDD is a set of practices which help software development teams to have conversations about the behavior of their system by talking through examples of how a user might use it.

Over the last nine years the adoption of BDD has grown globally, with dozens of tools created, used by hundreds of projects around the world. In this tutorial we look at the original reasons behind the creation of BDD, bringing the focus back to the language and conversations which lie at its heart. We look at how BDD’s patterns can be applied at multiple scales – from the initial project vision all the way to the code – to deliberately discover and address ignorance in every aspect of software development, producing reliable, maintainable software that matters.

This tutorial will be non-technical, focusing on conversations rather than automation. We’ll also be looking how to identify the places in which BDD doesn’t work so well, which plays nicely into…

Complexity Thinking

Have you ever wondered why big-analysis up-front never worked? Or wished you had the language to explain that to other people? Ever wondered why some things seem straight-forward while others defy analysis and prediction?

In this tutorial we’ll look at Cynefin, a framework for making sense of the world and the problems we encounter in it. We’ll also look at Deliberate Discovery and Real Options, and how they play into it, and we’ll practice coming up with experiments we could run in complex spaces that would still allow us to keep our options open.

This tutorial, highly applicable to software development, may also change the way in which you live your life…

NDC Oslo

As well as these tutorials, I’ll be talking about “Cynefin for Devs”, which covers the overlap between the two tutorials, looking at how complexity thinking is specifically applicable to BDD and IT in general.

NDC Oslo runs from 12th to 14th June with tutorials on 10th and 11th. I hope to see you there!