Devoxx - the crowd at our BOF

So today Slawek and I had our first talk at Devoxx 2008 about code review in agile teams.
We did it as a BOF, as we wanted to engage more people and hear how they cope with code reviews.
As it was rescheduled by Devoxx organizers at the very last moment from 19:00 to 20:00 and all printed-out materials including pocket guides were still pointing to the old time, I was expecting confusion and only several people to show up.

To my utter astonishment a crowd gathered in front of our BOF room just a few minutes before 20:00 and when we started, we was quickly run out of free seats and some people spend entire hour either standing or just laying down on the floor.
I am not sure what was the reason for such popularity of this topic (especially comparing to other BOFs, which definitely had fewer attendees). Maybe it's due to Atlassian name involved (as we work for Atlassian and I was sharing our lessons learnt there), which IMO has a very good reputation amongst developers. Maybe it was due to "agile" work used in the topic of the session (and "agile" has unfortunately become recently another popular buzzword, like SOA, although it definitely does not deserve it, as "agile" carries a lot of real value and sense). Maybe it was due to real interest in code reviews. Maybe it was due to IntelliJ IDEA involved (our IntelliJ Connector), which seems to be really popular among Devoxx participants (according to ad-hoc surveys done on whiteboards, about 30% of developers use it).

I will probably never know that.

Anyway, about 60 people showed up, they asked many interesting questions and we spend about an hour after the BOF outside the room, just exchanging our observations.

So although Demo God does not like me, as my Ubuntu spectacularly failed to properly detect projector and we we forced to use back-up Mac where we fortunately had established the exact copy ready for the presentation).
Alas, it did not help, as projector turned out to be supporting only crappy resolution of 800x600 pixels which is practically useless to demonstrate anything in IntelliJ IDEA with such resolution. Also Crucible web UI was hardly usable at such resolution.

So sorry folks, next time I will probably bring my own projector. :)

Anyway, a lot of people asked us to share our slides. Here it comes. Enjoy.

Devoxx08: Effective Code Reviews In Agile Teams

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

And thank you really for your coming and your participation. It was a great lesson for us.

See you on Thursday on our Quickie about Atlassian IDE Connector.