Two days conference with presentation tracks after the tutorial day, the 2nd day started at 13th Oct. Jose Diaz and Alessandro Collino gave the welcome speech, obviously they knew that shorter openning is the best 🙂
Lisa Crispin, the co-author of <Agile Testing> was the speaker of the 1st Key Note for the whole conference. Her topic was “Are Agile Testers Different?”, I remembered the Top 5 Principles of her team :
- continuous feedback
- direct communication
- simplicity
- responding to change
- enjoyment
And I got her signature for my copy of her book, lucky 🙂
There were 3 tracks ongoing at the same time, it’s very hard to choose a better one… however we had to make a decision… Fortunately the rooms were quite similar. One room for the key note speeches and track 1 sessions, and other two rooms for track 2 and track 3 accordingly.
“The Agility GPS” by Ulrich Freyer-Hirtz
I personally don’t believe we could measure agility, that’s why I’m so curious what does the Agility GPS mean. To me, the outcome was so limited. The speaker said it’s originated for “team”, not for project or bigger organization, and it’s also ongoing, not too much existing experience there. However, here’s roughtly the idea :
- take steps to do it : Kick-Off –> Agility Model Workshop –> Interviews –> Evaluation –> Demo of the Results –> Improvement Workshop –> Continuous Use.
- it maps “Agile” to its values, then the principles, and practices / question, and also their dependencies. Certain practices support higher principle with different power factors.
One interesting thing about this speaker is, he has a heavy programming style. e.g. in the first picture below, the title of the slide is “SetUp() who am I?”
Later sessions were :
- “BDD Approaches for Web Development” by Thomas Lundstrom : I didn’t feel understand him and BDD, the short deep discussion with Pekka later was far more effective, for the sake of understanding BDD and the relationship between BDD and ATDD.
- “Introduction to Robot Framework” by Pekka Klarck : a good friend giving a familiar topic, I joined in the last minutes. Plenty new things happened in Robot world, I have to catch up, and seems I made some progress already 🙂
- Key Note “Agile Testing, Uncertainty, Risk, and Why It All Works” by Elisabeth Hendrickson : I really like her style, could tell stories to attact people’s attension, and also hit the point after a while. She was always so passionate, an real test-obsessed professional tester! I didn’t record too many things down regarding her key note, I thought I knew all those things she presented, and I’m a lazy boy…
- “Agile Quality Management – Axiom or Oxymoron?” by David Evans : I was not so concentrated on listening this session, partly due to my emailling and the troublesome payment problem, partly due to the losing interests after watching some slides of his presentation.
- Key Note “Agile Inspections” by Tom Gilb : I felt so shame that I didn’t recognized him when I grabbed his seat, he nicely shared it with me, not a big issue, but at least he was gentle. The bad thing was, I was so confused in his key note, even he had some points which I like, even Tom Poppendieck mentioned in our later discussion that Tom Gilb intensionly confused the audience. However …
- The cow-boy
- Some slides in his presentation : he thought “clear / unambiguous / quantified qualities / no design or architecture” are the best rules to find major defects in specification. And indicated the definition of “Major” defect, also the exit level for major defects, tried to get managers agree on 100 major defects as the exit level, and the result was as the last picture …
Those were all for the 2nd day, in the evening, we had a small Oktoberfest, I’ll have a separate blog post for that.