#xpman 113 – Agile Left Security Behind. Introducing the Fourth Amigo.

Running fast can have profound security impacts. As with maintainability and scalability, security is another quality of engineering, and it’s the team’s responsibility to at least get the basics right. Anthony, a former developer and XP Manchester attendee will cover off some of the security issues he frequently comes across in modern webapps, and how you can avoid those pitfalls early in development.

Anthony is an independent cyber security consultant with a software engineering background. He specialises in promoting DevSecOps to empower teams to take ownership of the security of their products early in the development process. He achieves this by delivering training and through security consultancy.

This month we are at the BrightHR offices, from 18:30 for a 19:00 start.

Grab a free ticket.

XP Manchester 112 – the silent coding game

This month we’ll be thinking about what makes code and tests readable. We’ll work in pairs on a problem and take it in turns to not be able to speak, making our code do the talking.

You’ll need a laptop between two. Doors open at 6.30pm to start at 7pm.

Tickets available here.

XP Manchester 111 – Patterns relevance in a serverless/microservice world

For the last four years XP Manchester has been running debates on topics such as “is TDD dead?”, “The case against Cucumber”, the merits of #NoEstimates and branching vs trunk based development.

This year we asked for your input and one of our regulars suggested “in a world of microservices and serverless functions, are clean code and patterns still relevant?”

This month we’re at Sorted Group’s office just off Albert Square. Doors open at 6.30 to start at 7pm.

Tickets available here

Debate Subjects

This month we’re looking to run another debate at xpmanchester.

In previous years we’ve debated “is TDD dead?”, “The case against Cucumber”, the merits of #NoEstimates and branching vs trunk based development.

We’re after suggestions and volunteers for other things to debate this year.

Why debate?

Our careers depend greatly on being able to make value judgements between two or more competing options, often the options come with supporters or detractors. Supporters or detractors that can make convincing sounding, yet fallacious arguments…

By participating in debates and entertaining ideas that we don’t necessarily immediately agree with, we are hoping to improve our critical thinking and reasoning.

We don’t want to just look for supporting evidence for our current stand point, we want to challenge it. Other smart people have come to different conclusions and tooling and processes and languages – what have they seen that we have missed?

The aim of the session isn’t necessarily to win the argument, or to beat our opponents into submission with our force of will, but to examine our thinking and the thinking of our colleagues. Where might have we missed a vital piece of information, made an incorrect assumption, or incorrectly linked some things?

Like the software that we write, our thought processes and conclusions are a series of connected pieces of logic, and it definitely contains some bugs that we wrote.

XP Manchester 110 – ROI and refactoring

This month we’ll be learning about how to get the most bang for your buck when deciding which areas of a code base to improve.

Doors open at 6.30 to start at 7. This is a practical session so bring a laptop.

Tickets available here.

#xpman 109 – Ranty Lightning Talks

July is lightning talk month, but this year they have a little spin on them.

Inspired by FFSConf, these talks will be a little ranty, possibly quite sweary, and complete with an ‘off-the-record’ policy. The talks won’t be recorded and we ask attendees not to tweet quotes or photos of the presenter.

Although we hope for world class level rants, our speakers will be ranting _for_ something, they won’t be allowed to say something is completely crap without giving alternative suggestions.

Some titles of the rants –

• Aarrrrrghhhnemic Domains
• FFS Stand up for Yourselves
• FFS Learn to use Make
• Promises in Progress
• Your mockups are f*cking lying to you

Join us on Thursday 11th, we’ll be at Valtech offices from 18:30 for a 19:00 start.

Grab a ticket

Lightning Ran^H^H^H Talks July 11th – call for speakers! #xpman

Many of the interesting discussions from the group happen after the session has ended, when a group member asks a probing question or (more usually) takes off on an unscripted rant about something that bugs them that they see happening constantly.

The theme for this month’s lightning talks is _lovingly_ plagiarised from FFS Conf. We’re asking for ranty – possibly sweary – and hopefully entertaining lightning talks from people.

It’s an ‘off the record evening’ – meaning we’ll have a strict no photo/tweeting policy about what is said at the talks and no talks will be recorded. We want people to speak their mind about what annoys them about xp or agile. What mistakes do the speakers keep see being made? What can be done about them?

We’re asking that the talks don’t just focus on the negative aspects though. If something is crap (and we want you to call out the things that are) offer up some counter examples of how things could be better. Whilst we want the talks to be cathartic, we’re also hoping that they will be useful and productive ;)

We only have a couple of volunteers so far, and would love to see some new speakers join us, if you have any ideas of things you could rant about for 5-15 minutes (constructively…) please get in contact.

Message us on twitter @xpmanchester or email markkirschstein at gmail dot com.