Agile Testing Days Website
Here is a random collection of things I noticed on the Agile Testing Days which I left out of the previous entries on it. Mostly these refer to people being good at looking around, like Alistair Cockburn pointed it out.

Tutorial Day

On the tutorial from Elisabeth Hendrickson she pointed it out that it’s not a good combination of having a new laptop and trying to run a demo on it the next day. The GUI did not work, since she did not have all the necessary gems installed on it.

During the tutorial it was amazing that the people there were thinking of precedences in the error messages, which I had not yet thought up. As Elisabeth said “This is why we pair”.

First Presentations

While getting a test-obsessed wristband Elisabeth told me that Robert Martin had the idea with the Clean Code bands from her. Having received previously a Clean Code band, I now have two of these.

I noticed that people were quite precise regarding possible misuses of language regarding assets and documents. Here are some examples: Test Case Specification compared to Test Cases, Design document compared to the actual design in the software, Requirements documents and actual requirements. Each hand-off in addition adds more to the confusion here when working in a waterfall manner with them.

Elisabeth Hendrickson was writing her conference notes on index cards. This was amazing, since I used a college block for this.

Quality Software Management

I asked Elisabeth Hendrickson to sign my copy of Quality Software Management Vol. 1 which I was reading. Before the conference I planned to take my copy of The Art of Agile Development since she contributed the section on Exploratory Testing in it. Though I forgot to take the book with me. She told me in the ATDD tutorial that she is a student of Jerry Weinberg and since I was reading QSM by that time, I asked her to sign it for me. She felt very honored for that. In addition she told me the anecdote that she was working with Weinberg together on what got Perfect Software … and other illusions about testing. While they were working on it they needed to look something up in QSM. Jerry just took his laptop and opened the manuscript to it. She was still amazed when we met, that she was actually looking on a piece of history there. Unfortunately she did not have the time to finish the work on Perfect Software together with Jerry and told him to take everything they had up until that point.

Final reflection

Overall I really enjoyed the conference. Jose Diaz and Alessandro Collino did a great job deciding on the location, the presentations and the talks. I watch out for the submission deadline for next year (31. January 2010). Unfortunately I did not have an idea thus far on the particular content, but hopefully this will arise by the time.