Are you new to the software industry, and want to get a head start? Have you been practicing for a while, but always thought there had to be some deeper method to it? Have you heard about test-driven development, refactoring, or connascence, and always wanted to learn more about them?
We are resuming running an optional Training Day, on the Thursday ahead of the open space (inspired by the Foundations day at SoCraTes Germany).
The Training Day will happen Thurs 18th June '26, and is intended to open up the world of crafting and testing for newcomers and allow a deep-dive into certain topics. It offers a guided introduction to the conference experience. And provides an easy way to have all the questions you will probably arrive with answered by experienced practitioners.
Unlike the rest of the conference, this day does not follow the OpenSpace Technology format. The training day includes both introductory and advanced sessions. You will be able to choose which sessions to attend, allowing you to build a program that suits your needs.
Sessions will cover foundational topics - the roots of what our community is about - taught by tenured and distinguished community members with years of practical experience. There will also be sessions that take a deeper look at these topics.
| Time | Track A (Coding) | Track B (Practical Skills) |
| 09:15 - 09:30 | Welcome | |
| 09:30 - 10:30 | TDD Game with Cyber-Dojo  Jon Jagger |
|
| 10:30 - 10:45 | Break | |
| 10:45 - 12:45 | I Suppose This is My Life Now - Mercilessly Refactoring AI Code Duncan McGregor  and Nat Pryce  |
Secure Development Lifecycle Applied - How to Make Things a Bit More Secure than Yesterday Every Day  Lisi Hocke |
| 12:45 - 14:00 | Lunch | |
| 14:00 - 15:30 | Using TDD to Get Better Results From LLMs/AI  Clare Sudbery |
Hands-on: Bringing User Stories to Life  Gemma Cameron |
| 15:30 - 15:45 | Break | |
| 15:45 - 17:45 | Legacy Code - Characterization Testing with Approvals  Emily Bache |
Value Stream Mapping  Tim Ottinger |
| Time | Track A (Coding) | Track B (Practical Skills) |
Trainer: Jon Jagger
You will be practicing test driven development away from the pressures of getting things done. You will be using the innovative, open source, browser based Cyber-dojo which provides a highly effective environment designed specifically for reflection and improvement. This is a hands-on intense but fun workshop. There are no slides.
Trainer: Gemma Cameron
The hardest thing about software development is sharing ideas and understanding your users. What are we making, who is it for, what problems do they currently have, how can we fix them, how will they feel? What could go wrong for them?
User stories have become boring tasks written in gherkin syntax. How can the ideas and feelings be shared in such a simple way that even your family and friends will understand your product and its benefits? How can you understand the context the user is operating in? How can you build a system for them that helps rather than hinders in their workflow? How can you plan your system for when things go wrong?
We’ve got a fun thing for you to try in this workshop: Comics!
Bring a few of your own users stories and we’ll bring them to life in a very short amount of time, with no drawing skills required!
Please bring a laptop to this workshop.
Trainers: Duncan McGregor and Nat Pryce
This is SoCraTes. We’re all about the craft. But for some reason the code generated by guessing the next thing the average developer would type doesn’t meet our standards. And sometimes we just like to have a bit of fun.
Join Nat and Duncan in this two-hour workshop where we’ll let the AI do the initial grunt work so that we have more time to polish. First we’ll generate a game of snake; maybe even the tests. We could ship that, but it’s beneath us. How good could the code be? Duncan has a theory that Snake could be really pure, with only the single side effect of drawing the game state to the screen. Let’s refactor to find out.
Trainer: Clare Sudbery
How can you use an LLM to build reliable software? Is it even possible? Are the extravagant claims, both for and against, realistic?
If you combine tests and XP rigour with the efforts of an AI coding assistant, what you can get is something very powerful. This workshop will give you the to start building a very simple app using tests, process files and AI… as well as show some of the potential pitfalls.
Trainer: Emily Bache
In this hands-on session we’ll introduce a commonly-used Approval testing framework and learn to get control of some example code. The principles of Approval test design are in focus. Code demonstrations will be in Java, but exercises are available in several other languages including Python and C#.
After the workshop, participants should be able to:
Participants should bring a laptop and expect to work on some coding exercises during the workshop.
Trainer: Tim Ottinger
Often teams have trouble delivering software, even though they are working as fast as possible, and turning over tickets quickly. They are asked to work harder, but they are already at their maximum. Adding people doesn’t help, and seems to make the problem worse.
The problem is often that their way of work is full of hidden waits and waste. If they could see those issues, they would solve them.
Want to see how you can see your issues? Come see how we adopt a lean practice for agile software development that may change how you see your team’s interactions, and possibly may make it possible to 10x your delivery WITHOUT working harder.
We may even throw in some AI, just for fun.
Trainer: Lisi Hocke
Building valuable solutions is a complex endeavor that requires a breadth of knowledge. That not being enough, we’re also getting asked to build secure solutions in a secure way - yet what does that even mean? How do we incorporate such a vast area of expertise into our everyday workflows?
In this hands-on workshop, I will introduce you to core security concepts, like the CIA triad or defense in depth - and how we can apply them in everyday work. Based on a practical example, we will go through the development lifecycle with security in mind. You will learn about threat modeling to uncover risks early on, secure coding principles to bake security in, security testing approaches to make informed decisions depending on your risk appetite, and ways of detecting potentially malicious activity to protect against. Interactive exercises at each step will let you experience how security can neatly fit with what you’re already doing without adding artificial gates.
Whether you want to keep your system secure or get a neglected one back in shape, this session is for you. Join us to gain fundamental security knowledge, hone your security skills, and get tactical advice to secure your development lifecycle. Let’s make things a bit more secure than yesterday every day!
Jon Jagger is head of software at Kosli.
He specialises in practice, process, test driven development, and complex-adaptive systems-thinking.
He’s 39 years old (hex) and has loved software since he was 10 (decimal).
He’s married to the beautiful Natalie, and proud father of Ellie, Penny and Patrick, and grandfather to Kobi.
He built Cyber-dojo.org to promote deliberate practice for software developers.
He was a self-employed consultant for 20+ years. He’s worked with Accenture, Aviva, Cisco, Ericsson, Friends Provident, HP, Microsoft, Opera, Ordnance Survey, RBS, Reuters, Renault F1, Schlumberger, Tandberg and many many more.
He’s the co-author (with Olve Maudal) of the Deep C/C++ slide deck (over 1,000,000 views).
He’s the ex ECMA Task Group 2 C# convenor.
He’s had some C# books published.
He’s the ex ACCU conference chairman.
He loves coarse fishing and salmon fishing.
He lives in Somerset, England.
Gemma Cameron is a tech and business consultant, software developer, and experienced speaker based in Manchester. She has been an active member of the UK tech community for over a decade, speaking at conferences including SPAConf, Agile Manchester and DDD Europe.
Her work focuses on bridging the gap between business and engineering teams, with a particular interest in people, ways of working, and making complex ideas practical and usable. Alongside her consulting work, she writes about engineering culture, hiring, and team development on rubygem.blog
If that doesn’t interest you, she has a whole cheese joke routine and a wealth of ferret facts.
Duncan McGregor has been a professional software developer for 35 years. He was lucky enough to be an early adopter of Object Oriented programming, which was the gateway drug to patterns, Extreme Programming, agile and lean. He coauthored Java to Kotlin: A Refactoring Guidebook, published by O’Reilly. These days he is mostly retired, but still produces a weekly YouTube video on something that interests him.
He has tried almost anything in his quest for better software, including, but not limited to, actually talking to people.
Nat Pryce has been programming for <coughty-cough> years, across many languages, platforms, application domains and industries. He enjoys sharing programming tips, tricks and techniques. He co-authored the books “Java to Kotlin: A Refactoring Guidebook” and “Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided by Tests”.
Lisi Hocke found tech as her place to be in 2009 and has grown as a specialized generalist ever since. Building great products that deliver value together with great people motivates her and lets her thrive.
As a security engineer, she’s now fully focusing on all things product security to help build more secure solutions. She’s committed to testing and quality, passionate about whole-team approaches to increase effectiveness and resilience, and enjoys experimenting and learning continuously. Having received a lot from communities, Lisi is paying it forward by sharing her stories and learning in public.
She posts on Mastodon as @lisihocke@mastodon.social and blogs at www.lisihocke.com. In her free time, she plays indoor volleyball or delves into computer games and stories of all kinds.
Emily Bache is an independent consultant, YouTuber and Technical Coach. She works with developers, training and coaching effective agile practices like Refactoring and Test-Driven Development. Emily has written two books about software development and contributed to several others.
A frequent conference speaker, Emily has been invited to keynote at prestigious developer events including EuroPython, Craft and ACCU. Emily founded the Samman Technical Coaching Society in order to promote technical excellence and support coaches everywhere.
Tim Ottinger is a long-time software developer, manager, consultant, author, coach, blogger, speaker, and podcast guest. He is a methods-agnostic agilist with a bias toward Continuous Delivery and XP. He has taught thousands of people how to build software in safer, smarter, faster ways.
He works with frontline developers all the way up to executives as a “full stack” consultant and advisor. He plays guitar a bit, and mandolin, bass, and harmonica a bit less than that. He includes continuous learning, developing trust, and engaging curiosity as side dishes in his technical training. He loves simple formalities that get work done.
Clare Sudbery is a software trainer with over 25 years of software experience. She curates and delivers training for early-career developers at Autotrader UK, and specialises in technical leadership, Test Driven Development (TDD), combining TDD with genAI, refactoring, continuous integration and other eXtreme Programming (XP) practices.
She’s an ex high school maths teacher, taught the Coding Black Females’ Return to Tech programme and co-ran Made Tech’s academy. She has a passion for helping under-represented groups to flourish in tech.
COVID-19 still causes illness and long-term harm across the world (source).
We want to keep attendees safe, while at the same time allowing for as much familiarity and community spirit as possible.
Each measure on its own has flaws but together they offer better protection.
For this reason our policy at the conference this year will be:
We encourage you to test if possible before you start travelling. We had one person arrive with covid in 2025 and we are currently preparing a description of what we did and what we can expect from each other when that happens.
We welcome practitioners and learners at all levels at SoCraTes - because we believe that sharing, teaching and learning are equally important to the community health, and that this is a fundamental part of what makes SoCraTes the magical place it is. Training Day is intended to build bridges and make it easier to join the community, not to create an extra entry barrier.
So yes, you can join the OpenSpace whatever your level, and whether or not you have attended the Training Day.
The training day is not part of the regular SoCraTes UK programme. It requires both extra preparation - especially for the session hosts - and additional cost. As a consequence, you will have to pay a cover charge of £375 to attend.
There is an option to arrive the Wednesday evening for an extra £110 (accommodation + dinner & breakfast).
Visit our tickets page to secure your place (scroll down to the “Buy a ticket” button in the middle of the page).