To Trust, Tag and Test

Around fifty software developers attended this weeks first EBU DevCon event in Geneva, picking up valuable tips and best practices from leading experts in the field.

The first EBU software developers conference (DevCon) delivered a series of high-quality tips and best practices for software engineering. It also provided attendees with an improved understanding of hot trends in the industry. Keywords included software names such as Django, Git, and Puppet, but what stood out above all were three verbs: Trust, Tag and Test.

To Trust As both Laura Thomson (Mozilla Firefox) and Nathan Yergler (Eventbrite) emphasized in their presentations, tools are nothing in a team that lacks trust. This is partly a cultural issue. It is also one that is largely underestimated. Simple ways to improve trust inside organizations is to not blame people for errors, but to try to imagine from the other person's perspective what could be improved, to always communicate respectfully and, maybe most importantly, to start by trusting your colleagues.

To Tag Turning to the coding work itself, a vital part is actually not new, but still very hard to do well in practice: documentation. In the context of modern versioning systems such as Git, this means making sure the code is tagged appropriately. "Commits" should include a note on why something was changed, for example, and not only say what has been modified.

To Test All code needs to be tested, to make sure the software does what it promises to do. The good news is that very powerful platforms, such as Puppet, allow for extensive automated testing of deployments, while other software promises to help project owners to script test scenarios for use in development.

The EBU's Michael Barroco concluded that the first DevCon was a success. He explained it is part of several EBU activities aimed at helping Members deal with software projects. Another is the launch of the EBU.io platform, which provides a point of reference for media-related software projects, and, following DevCon, the start of what could become a flourishing community of media-aware software architects.

Read more about DevCon 2013 on the EBU Events Blog: DevCon 1: beyond Command & Control

Photo: Bertrand Delacretaz of Adobe spoke about the Apache Foundation, as an example of collaborative, consensus-based development.

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