For those tracking the movement of luminaries such as Martin Fowler and Kent Beck or looking for scalability advice from the architects at companies like Orbitz, Ebay, and Linked-In… QCon ’07 in downtown San Francisco is the place to be!
The conference is packed with senior architects, software engineers, and open-source contributors galore — over 400 were rumored
to be in attendance. With speaker topics ranging from enterprise scalability to Agile practices, the audience was nothing short of being at the top of their game. Huddled together at the entrance to the conference rooms were a 
number of vendors showing off new warez including AccuRev. Here’s a shot of Damon Poole & Cliff Utstein (top-right), Dave Thomas (left), and John Wall (bottom-right). The AccuRev booth had a 
constant flow of folks amazed at how the stream-based architecture brings a refreshing approach to managing software configurations and supporting agile practices. We also had some cameo appearances from existing customers like Authorize.Net and Orbitz.com.
Agile development methodologies is a major theme of the conference. For someone looking for advice on agile, just standing in the middle of the exhibit hall is all it takes — everyone is talking about best practices, success stories, and failed attempts.
We had a constant stream of people intrigued by our stream-based architecture and inherent support for agile practices. Here’s a list of common discussion points:
private workspaces: commit-early, commit-often
stream inheritance: merge-early, merge-often and sharing iterations early and automatically with parallel development efforts
issue tracking integration: assign, deliver and track development activity to stories/issues/features
continuous integration: integrations with cruise control, finalbuilder, electric-cloud, and others
refactoring: IDE integrations with eclipse, Intelli-J, Visual Studio support application-wide refactoring with version control
staged workflows: organize distributed teams and isolate integration areas from testing areas for explicit and repeatable access to known configurations.
snapshots: guaranteed reproducibility of labeled configurations for builds known to be ‘good’
reparenting: retarget active development to known good configurations for testing or stable development
If you didn’t have a chance to attend this years QCon, be sure to put next years event on your calendar!
/happy conferencing/ – dave
