This month we had a relatively light turnout, with about 15 people RSVPing and about 12 showing up for the event.  Several new members made it to their first meeting tonight, which is great to see.  We got started around 6pm with Mike Falanga giving a talk summarizing some of his experiences at last month's sdtconf.com (Simple Design and Testing Conference) in Pittsburgh.  He talked about the Hollywood Principle and how it related to Dependency Inversion.  Jeff Morgan (cheezy) had also attended sdtconf, and gave a very condensed version of the presentation he gave there on the need for business analysts, QA and testers to become more automated and for management to understand the need for changes in these areas when adopting agile, not just from the dev teams.

Much discussion was had around these topics, naturally.  Rumors flew that next year there may be an SDTConf in Ohio, possibly in Columbus or at the LeanDog boat.  Chzy also invited everyone to the December 5th 2009 CodeRetreat event LeanDog is hosting.

For our hands-on exercise, we worked on the Potter Kata in pairs, using Java, .NET, or Ruby (and perhaps FoxPro, not sure).  At least two pairs completed the problem such that the given example (a cart with 8 books that should total 51.20 EUR) passed correctly.  It's a deceptively simple problem because it's very easy to get started with tests to prove that the price is correct for any combination of single titles.  However, once you start to get multiples of titles, the way you arrange them into sets can affect the final price, and the goal of the pricing engine is to always give the customer the best possible price.

I expect we'll see several members continue the problem and perhaps blog about it.  Mention @HudsonSC on twitter with your blog post and we'll retweet it.

Finally, due to travel on the part of both Henning Software and NimblePros people who coordinate the group, there will be no meeting in November.  Our next meeting of Hudson Software Craftsmanship will be on 16 December 2009.  As usual, arrive between 5:30 and 6pm and we'll get started at 6.