Agile Testing Days 2012: Day 1

I would like to share some photos, impressions, outcomes and insights that I have got this week during Agile Testing Days conference. The conference happens on 20-22 November in Potsdam. This post is about first day: 20th of November.


Our team has come to the conference around 8:30. We have successfully finished a registration and were waiting for the beginning of the very first keynote by Scott Ambler. Here are some photos of my team mates:

Valerio (Italy)

Pedro (Portugal)

Alexey (Russia)

Regis (France)

Peter (Ukraine)

Claus (Germany)

So far we have come to the main presentation room for the keynote and it has started.

Scott Ambler: "Disciplined Agile Delivery: The Foundation for Scaling Agile"

Well. For me that has been very odd presentation. Scott Ambler wrote 21 books (this is what I've remembered). His talk was about some "yet another" new methodology which he named "Disciplined Agile Delivery". Breath in! It is "process framework which is a goal-driven, hybrid agile framework which adopts strategies from Scrum, XP, Agile Modeling, Lean Software Development, Kanban, Unified Process (sic!) and other modern methods". Breath out! It sounds like silver bullet has been finally found. The slides contained a lot of information which was not mentioned in a speech. Very soon I've stopped to follow the narrative and started to check twitter. Wow! There was really huge buzz under #agiletd. Most of people were complaining about unreadable slides (too small font and overloaded with irrelevant information) and vague content. Something positive has appeared in the very end. Scott has shared results of the survey he sent to conference participants some weeks before. I will not repeat the results, you can find them on Scott's page. OK, there was also a couple of other interesting points in Scott's talk which I appreciate and I think they worth mentioning. First point is that most of current systems (bank, medical, etc.) being in use were developed still in "waterfall" age (surprise, agile guys!). And they continue to work without agile. Second point is that all modern agile-like methodologies are not teaching us to respect the code of our predecessors. Totally agree! I think this is one of bad things in our geeky developers' world. We don't respect each other, we like to bridle up and we like to blame others. Frankly, a couple of years ago I had same habits. I am not sure when it has changed, but now I am always trying to understand and minimize blaming. So to conclude outcomes about Scott's presentation I would say it still had something new and interesting, but was not very well presented, especially for the beginning of the conference.

After that the "tracked" sessions have started. You have to choose one of 4-5 "tracks" which happens at the same time. The only criteria to select is to read an abstract. On the third day we have finally deduced proper KPI to select best speech: the quality of presentation is inversely to the length of an abstract.

So far Regis, Pedro and I have gone to

Peter Varhol: "Moneyball and the Science of Building Great Agile Team"

Free stuff that I've collected

I really liked Peter's talk. It has very clear and focused slides, he was very pleasant and charming speaker. He has started with baseball parallels emphasizing the fact that even if you pick the great players you won't necessary get the great team. Then he has switched to the explanations about two thinking systems: the concept that being introduced by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Unfortunately there was one negative point about this talk: Peter didn't manage to get in time. When about 10 minutes has been left, he started to rush and quickly fast-forwarded through the majority of most important slides which were describing how you should apply all concepts to build agile team. I still hope that when organizers of the conference will share slides, I could find Peter's slides there.

Next talks selection was not so interesting to me, so far I've gone alone to

Mike Scott & Tom Roden: "Archetypes and Templates: Building a lean, mean BDD automation machine for multiple investment platforms"

This talk was more technical on one side. On other side nothing new for me. Guys have extended combination of FitNesse and Cucumber with an approach which they have called "archetypes and templates".

Archetypes and templates architecture

In fact I would say that this is just some kind of data-driven approach. The results were looking quite nice, but still the talk itself was a bit boring for me.

The talk was finished and we've had some spare time to get the lunch and to chat. After the lunch we were having again keynote presentation. This went quite well, especially considering the fact that later one of presenters was awarded as "Most influential agile person 2012".