Pete McBreen

President, Software Craftsmanship Inc.
http://www.mcbreen.ab.ca/

Keynote: Software Engineering: Do you want fries with that?

Software engineering seems to be trying to design an inappropriate future. Rather than embracing talent, it seems to be striving to deskill software development. Certification and Best Practices will inevitably lead to stagnation and deskilling, where practitioners are focused on following the procedures rather than thinking about appropriate actions.

My design for the present is to create a working environment that embraces craftsmanship in software development so that we call all employ our creativity, artistry and coding skills to deliver applications that delight our users.

Rather than designing a future where software engineers are working at the level of "Do you want fries with that?" we should be designing a future that enables software developers to enjoy using their talents over a career at least as long as enjoyed by virtuoso musicians, artists and architects.

Biography

Pete McBreen is the author of Software Craftsmanship and Questioning Extreme Programming. He is an independent consultant who actually enjoys writing and delivering software. Despite spending a lot of time writing, teaching and mentoring, he goes out of his way to ensure that he does hands-on coding on a live project every year. Pete specializes in finding creative solutions to problems that software developers face. After many years of working on formal and informal process improvement initiatives, he took a sideways look at the problem and realized, "Software development is meant to be fun. If it isn't, the process is wrong." Pete lives in Cochrane, Alberta, Canada and has no plans to move back to a big city.

His specialty is in assisting small teams in the development of object-oriented software. With over 22 years of experience, Pete started working with C++ in 1989 and has specialized in helping teams transition into object technology. He is a course designer, teacher, and coach in object technology. Pete has delivered tutorials at TOOLS USA and OOPSLA and regularly teaches Use Case and OO Design courses.

Every year Pete works as a developer in a project team to ensure that what he talks about actually works in practice. In recent years this has included enhancing an airline's website to increase the volume of reservations made over the web, writing message oriented middleware and being the technical lead for a stock exchange workstation. These experiences have confirmed for him the value of well written use cases, test driven development and frequent releases to the user community.

Over the course of his career Pete has worked in many different mission and performance critical domains including Credit Card Authorization, Stock Exchange workstations, Airline Websites for reservations, Manufacturing Resource Planning and Job Scheduling, Time and Attendance and Payroll Systems.

Mr. McBreen has been quoted as saying "Software development is meant to be fun. If it isn't, the process is wrong." This reflects his personal philosophy that "the software development process must support the ways that people naturally work." Software systems are such a fundamental part of any corporation that the sustained ability to enhance and extend systems is what matters most. Truly incremental object oriented development processes are a means of achieving this goal."

His new book, Software Craftsmanship is Pete's contribution to the ongoing debate about how to improve software development. Questioning Extreme Programming continues this exploration, but along a slightly different track.