Agile Testing Days Website
On the Agile Testing Days on Tuesday the first presentations settled off. In the meantime pictures from the conference have been put up. Here are portions of my notes from Tuesday.

Agile Testing Days Website
On Monday evening of the Agile Testing Days all speakers were invited to go to lunch from the organizators. I had the dear honor to sit next to Tom Gilb with Mary & Tom Poppendieck directly facing. Though I was not able to follow the complete conversation in-depth, I was able to get most of their points. Unfortunately I didn’t take notes on everything discussed there, but I denoted two things on the next day from that conversation.

Agile Practices in a Traditional Environment from Markus Gärtner

I put up my slides to my presentation at the Agile Testing Days. It was a very tough talk for me. The first conference presentation I made. Before the presentation I was very nervous, but I had a good feeling afterwards. In addition I realized that I will have to work on my entertaining skills for future presentations. Among the things that I just verbally mentioned during the talk – there was no video taken from the talk – are three more successors of our work. The first one is the outcome that over the course of our work a colleague transitioned from the testing group to the development group as one outcome. Another thing that I mentioned is the fact that I was able to learn Java programming sufficiently enough to contribute to the test framework FitNesse over the course of this year. Third recently I paired with a developer on fixing a bug in the production code. I noted the bug when it was first filed, wrote a failing acceptance test for it, and decided to help the developer with the fix, since I would have been blocked otherwise. I showed him how to rewrite the rather complex if-then-else chain the code showed up with – not covered by fast-feedback unittests – and afterwards we fixed the bug and delivered the fix.

Since I know that it will be hard to understand anything from my rather condensed presentation style format, I also decided to put up the nine pages of paper I wrote. You can find the paper as a pdf here. If you attended my presentation and are looking for more in-depth knowledge of what we did, take a look into it.
The paper walks you through an application of Agile practices in a traditional environment, where a small group of testers used the practices to succeed with converting their automated test cases to a maintainable new automation approach. The bibliography section will also conclude with the book references I gave.

Thanks to Matt Heusser, Gojko Adzic and Mike Scott on the presentation, Lisa Crispin, Brett Schuchert, Stephan Flake and Gregor Gramlich reviewed the paper, thanks to them, too.