Mike Hill, Exdriven Ltd

Mike Hill is an independent consultant, developing and coaching on Agile projects in London.

Mike began his professional career back in 1993, with Logica. He spent several years in the US before returning to London in 2001, where he was introduced to Agile/XP through his work at Kizoom. After a brief stint at ThoughtWorks in 2004, Mike went independent. Recent clients include UBS, Sky Network Services, BBC and BNP Paribas.

Mike is a regular speaker at industry conferences and helps to organise the London XP Day conference.

Presentation: "Programming In The Small"

Track: Turning on a sixpence - technical skills for Agile development

Time: Wednesday 13:00 - 14:00

Location: Abbey Room

Abstract:

Code quality matters. Not everyone writes great code. Some developers keep habits which they learnt when writing code in languages which forced styles (e.g. declaring all variables at the beginning of a function) which are no longer appropriate to the language they are now using.

Some developers think that only the architecture matters and small details like code aren't important. In this interactive tutorial, Mike & Ivan will work (real, live coding!) through a series of small refactoring exercises, each designed to bring out a particular learning point from Ivan's "Programming in the Small" blog series (http://ivan.truemesh.com/archives/cat_programming_in_the_small.html).

Attendees will see that by applying a collection of quite small scale refactorings, code ends up being significantly easier to read and modify. The programming language used will be Java.