Speaking

Dave Rooney speaking to an audience at a conference, gesturing beside a slide reading 'The best tests make change safe'

Conference talks, meetup sessions, and workshops on process flow, technical excellence, engineering practices, and responsible AI-assisted development.

The question I'm asked most these days is how to use AI on a real codebase without giving up the engineering judgement that keeps it safe. I've done that work, characterizing unfamiliar legacy code, building a safety net of tests with an assistant, finding out where it helped and where it got in the way.

What you get is evidence from actual work rather than raw enthusiasm.


Upcoming

(Stay tuned)

Past Talks

  • Agile Ottawa Meetup Group
    Taming the Legacy Beast with AI

    My journey from using LLMs to understand legacy code, to adding tests where there were none, to actively developing with a test-driven approach — with case studies from the past 18 months.

  • Prairie Dev Con Winnipeg
    Confessions of a Flow Junkie

    Disruptions to flow cost us time, money and trust, yet most of the time we don't even notice them — exploring flow at several levels, experiencing it first-hand through group activities, and the actions a team can take immediately to recover it.

  • Prairie Dev Con Winnipeg
    Exploring Legacy Code Test-First with AI

    A pile of unfamiliar legacy code, no tests, a hard deadline and no option to rewrite: how JetBrains' AI Assistant helped characterize the behaviour and build a safety net of tests, where it helped and where it hindered.

  • Iowa .NET User Group
    #NoBigProcesses

    Do we really need Scrum, Kanban, SAFe or Extreme Programming to succeed? Starting from two principles common to every successful delivery approach, and building out a process tailored to your own team.

  • Agile Ottawa Meetup Group
    Back to the Days of Future Passed

    Agile Software Development turned twenty in 2021 — what went wrong, what went right, and how we can recover the optimism and excitement of those early days.

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