Joshua will be presenting topics covered in his new book Refactoring to Patterns, the latest book in Martin Fowler's Signature series. The meeting is being held on a Wednesday as Joshua is speaking at the SD Best Practices conference in Boston earlier that week. The meeting will be held at the Qwest Auditorium in Downtown Denver. Doors open at 6:00pm for networking and refreshments.

Refactoring to Patterns is the marriage of refactoring -- the process of improving the design of existing code -- with patterns, the classic solutions to recurring design problems. Refactoring to Patterns suggests that using patterns to improve an existing design is better than using patterns early in a new design. This is true whether code is years old or minutes old. We improve designs with patterns by applying sequences of low-level design transformations, known as refactorings.

This talk will help you:

• Understand how to combine refactoring and patterns
• Improve the design of existing code with pattern-directed refactorings
• Identify areas of code in need of pattern-directed refactoring
• Learn why using patterns to improve existing code is better than using patterns early in a new design

This talk is for object-oriented programmers, architects and agile testers engaged in or interested in improving the design of existing code. Whether you are doing greenfield or legacy development, the refactorings and design ideas in this talk will help you with your work.

Joshua Kerievsky is the founder of Industrial Logic, a company that specializes in Extreme Programming. He began his career as a professional programmer at a Wall Street bank, where he programmed numerous financial systems for credit, market, and global risk departments. After a decade at the bank, he founded Industrial Logic in 1995 to help companies practice successful software development.

Kerievsky has programmed and coached on small, large, and distributed XP projects since XP's emergence. He recently pioneered Industrial XP, an application of XP tailored for large organizations. Kerievsky has written XP articles in Extreme Programming Examined and Extreme Programming Perspectives and has recently authored the book, Refactoring to Patterns. He may be reached at joshua_at_industriallogic.com.

The Fall 2004 Rocky Mountain Software Symposium will be held November 12-14, 2004. Special pricing of $575/person valid thru October 15 using the code "rmssjug575" has been extended to Agile Denver members.

Advance Praise for Refactoring to Patterns:

"For refactoring to be valuable it must be going somewhere, not just an abstract intellectual exercise. Patterns document program structures with known good properties. Put the two together and you have Refactoring to Patterns. If you want your refactorings to go somewhere, I suggest you read and apply Refactoring to Patterns." -Kent Beck, Director, Three Rivers Institute

"In the GoF book we claimed that design patterns are targets for refactorings. This book finally shows that we didn’t lie. By doing so, Joshua’s book will deepen your understanding of both refactoring and design patterns." -Erich Gamma, Eclipse Java Development Tools lead, IBM

"Now the connection between software patterns and agile development is finally told." -Ward Cunningham