At last years Developer Summit in Stockholm I gave a talk about professionalism (see Talks) very much inspired by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) and the budding Software Craftsmanship movement (more on that later I hope). This year I won’t be among the speakers, but I am proud to be hosting the Method track. My take on method in this context is in a way a continuation of my talk last year since its focus is delivering quality software by writing good clean code.

First out is Torkel Ödegaard with a talk on managing dependencies, Dependency Inversion Principle, Inversion of Control containers and such. Torkel is a really smart and skilled guy and I am glad to announce that he is now a colleague of mine since he recently joined Avega. The downside of this is that it makes the track look a little incestuous because the next guy in line also happens to have Avega as his employer…

Peter Hultgren is going to talk about that has been dear to me for a very long time – refactoring. I’ve seen Peter deliver presentations at customers and at the ALT.NET unconference and he’s an entertaining speaker with a flare for slide design. Of course he’s also passionate about refactoring to clean and simple code.

If you know anything about Agile Sweden you probably know of the third speaker, Joakim Holm. Jocke is an experienced agile practitioner, blogger, coach and educator, always with something interesting to say from that point of view you seem to usually forget yourself. This time he will tell us about his experiences and observations from pair-programming and other ways to collaborate around code.

Last but not least we have the honour of Scott Bellware visiting us to do both a talk and a full days workshop on “Good Test, Better Code”, his own take on Behaviour-Driven Development. For those of you who still don’t know Scott, he’s a developer, agile coach and product director. He speaks and teaches at software conferences in North America and Europe. Scott can also be said to be one of the founders of ALT.NET.

Scott has a great testimonial of himself on his web site, by no one less than Ted Neward, that I want to quote in its entirety because it’s a fun and eloquent characterization of Scott and why you should go to his talk and/or workshop:

“Scott is one of those rare individuals with strong opinions, strong technical skills and experience, and a clarity of purpose and character that demands the highest expectations of himself and the people around him. Never have I met someone who is both so open-minded and yet so passionately outspoken. If people like me are priests of a technical religion, then Scott is the prophet in the wilderness, dressed in sackcloth and ashes, preaching to a growing community of people who want to see software ‘done right’. Anyone who is involved in the development of software, whether they agree with Scott or not, needs to listen to what he has to say.”

Scott will also be giving a talk on “Web Testing for Developers with Application Models” in the Web track.

There are of course several other very interesting speakers and topics at Developer Summit, such as Linda Rising on trust, self-deception and retrospectives; Brian Loesgen on “All things ‘M'” and SOA; Ian Robinson (ThoughtWorks) on REST; and Julia Lerman on Entity Framework.

I hope you like the line-up as much as I do and that I’ll see you at Developer Summit, April 15-17!