Session: Zen and the Art of Software

Thursday, 14:20 - 15:10
Track: Excellence

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a book about Quality; what it is, where it exists, and how we may try to attain it. In this talk, I will use passages from the book to introduce ideas on how we, as software developers, might try to improve the Quality both of the software we create and of ourselves. I’ll talk about what “Quality” means in the context of software, how to measure it, and the importance of close interaction with users at all stages of application development.

Prerequisites

No familiarity with the book is necessary (although I recommend reading it anyway!), and there is no language or platform specific content.

Expectations

Which attributes are important in the perception of Quality. Practices for engaging customers and end-users in ensuring the Quality of software.

Mark Rendle

Mark’s career in software design and development spans three decades and more programming languages than he cares to remember. He is currently employed as Principal Architect at Dot Net Solutions, creating software with ASP.NET MVC, WPF, Silverlight and Windows Azure. He is a Windows Azure MVP. In his spare time, he enjoys learning new programming languages and paradigms (2011 is the year of CoffeeScript and F#), and works on the Simple.Data project, and Pocket C# for Windows Phone 7.

Mark Rendle