ThoughtWorks Master Class Series 2007 in Bangalore and Pune

The Master Class Series is an annual seminar organised by ThoughtWorks India. It focuses on topics which are cutting edge, but the content of the seminars is drawn from real-life experiences on live projects. The presenters are all people with extensive hands-on experience and have delivered successful projects using the concepts they are talking about.

The presenters include;

• Mr.Pramod Sadalage

Topic - Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Development.
For years the norm for object developers was to work in an evolutionary (iterative and incremental) manner but for database developers to work in a more serial manner. The predominance of evolutionary development methodologies such as Extreme Programming (XP), Feature Driven Development (FDD) make it clear that the two groups need to work in the same manner to be productive as a team.

Pramod will present material from his 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning book "Refactoring Databases : Evolutionary Database Design" on how to go about doing evolutionary database development and will talk about the following techniques, Database refactoring, Evolutionary data modeling, Database testing, Configuration management of database artifacts and developer sandboxes.

• Mr.Vivek Prahlad

Topic - Evolutionary Testing: Adapting to changing applications

Automated functional testing is a key technique that allows complex systems to rapidly evolve without regressing. When a system grows, and the amount of functionality that the system offers also grows, so does it's test suite. After a while, a test suite can become as large and as complex as the system that it tests. Maintaining large test suites needs the same kind of concepts and principles that enable development teams to tackle complexity - concepts and principles such as design, refactoring, reusability, and abstraction. This talk covers the issues involved with the functional testing of applications that change - moving targets that need new techniques for testing them.

• Mr.Srihari Srinivasan

Topic - Domain Specific Languages: Real world experiences.

A DSL lies somewhere between a tiny programming language and a scripting language, and is often used in a way analogous to a programming library. The boundaries between these concepts are quite blurry, much like the boundary between scripting languages and general-purpose languages. They are created specifically to solve problems in a particular domain and are not intended to be able to solve problems outside of it.

In some situations, creating a DSL can hugely benefit a project, allowing business rules to be defined and changed on the fly, often by the end-users of the system. This talk focuses on Domain Specific Languages and how we have used them in a few of our projects.

Following is the introduction of the presenters

Pramod Sadalage :

Pramod Sadalage is the co-author of the Jolt Productivity Award winning "Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Development", a Martin Fowler signature series book and author of "Recipes for Continuous Database Integration". Pramod works as a DBA and developer at ThoughtWorks. He works on large custom-developed applications which use agile. While on these projects, he pioneered the practices and processes of agility in the database. Pramod endeavors to write and speak about these concepts and practices to help those interested in using agile practices on databases. Pramod has written and presented about database administration on XP projects, the adoption of agile processes with databases, and the impact of agile practices on database administration and design. Pramod is the owner and founder of the agiledatabases Yahoo! group; he moderates group discussions and helps group members learn about agile databases. When he is not working, you can find him spending time with his wife Rupali and daughter Arula, and trying to improve his running.

Vivek Prahlad :

Vivek Prahlad has over 8 years of industry experience. He joined ThoughtWorks Inc. in 2003 after a stint at i2 Technologies, where he lead the development of i2’s scheduling products. During his career, Vivek has worked as a Technical Lead, Agile Coach, and Project Manager. He has worked in various software industry verticals, including supply chain management, manufacturing, financial services, and embedded systems. He is currently the Director of Innovation at ThoughtWorks India and is also the author of Frankenstein, an Open Source testing tool for Swing applications.

Srihari Srinivasan :

Srihari is a senior developer with considerable experience in multiple languages and technologies. He helped develop and deliver what was arguably India's first commercial Ruby on Rails project in mid-2005. He is also the author of the open source tool Migrator, a java implementation of Rails style database migrations. Rails migrations, incidentally, are an example of Domain Specific Languages.

Bangalore Event
Day & Date : Saturday 19th May, 2007
Time : 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM
Venue : Royal Orchid Park Plaza,
            Spring Hall,
            Adjoining KGA Golf Course, Airport Road,
            Bangalore.

To register for Bangalore event, click here

Pune Event
Day & Date : Saturday 26th May, 2007
Time: 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM
Venue : Sun-n-Sand,
            The Peshwa Hall,
            262, Bund Garden Road,
            Pune.

To register for Pune event, click here

Regards,
Kumar Thirumal.