8/17/2007

XPDays 2007: program online, aka: conference processes

The program of the XPDays 2007 is arranged and can be found online here. The program is pretty thrilling and manifold. It contains e.g. talks about agile usage of Rails, Groovy, ABAP, talks about FDD, 37signals and a lot TDD stuff. I look forward hearing experience reports of SAP. My personal hightlight is "Einfluss der Programmiererfahrung auf den Prozess der testgetriebenen Entwicklung" -- an academic analysis of the dependency between programming experience and TDD. Very seldom that these kind of topics are analyzed funded.

I have to say I really enjoyed being part of the programm committee this year. On the other hand I still have shady feelings about the session election process of some conferences in general. Consider a talk which is only evaluated by some few guys. This is not really representative for the whole community. The censors have a big responsibility giving the rating.

Additionally, if there is a submission of a guy who is not very famous his submission may get a negative evaluation. If the submitter is well-known and knows guys in the committee he may get a good evaluation although his submission is pretty bad -- the censor may say "Oh, this session is proposed by Sponge Bob. I know him. He is funny. I don't understand his abstract, but it must be of value because Sponge had a nice session last year and he can drink beer like ten". Or censor Patrick says: "I do not understand Sponge's abstract! He writes he will present abc. But I do not understand the benefits of abc". OK, Patrick reads the abstract but does not anticipate the whole session -- only its topic and basic content. Is this a reason to vote against the session?

Ambivalent!

... I guess the program of this year's XPDays Germany is fair and exciting.

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