Gojko Adzic

The second Alt.Net UK open conference took place on Saturday in London, with about 100 people attending and 16 sessions. The event, at least for me, felt much more like an informal get-together then a software conference which was a great thing. All the sessions were organised as discussions, not presentations, with people just exchanging ideas and experiences.

The conference started with a very controversial topic on what Alt.NET actually represents. Most of the people at the conference had an idea what Alt.NET means, according to a quick poll, but this does not mean that we all thought of the same thing. Taking some ideas from the discussion, keeping an open mind and looking for solutions outside of anything prescribed by Microsoft’s monopoly seem to be a common theme, as well as trying to apply best practices and innovative ideas that emerged in the community before commercial vendors release or start supporting the tools for that. I still think that the name Alt.NET is wrong because it projects the image of this being an alternative to .NET, when in fact it makes .NET platform easier to use and implement things on it. We discussed some different names such as opensource .net (which is not good since some “alt” tools like powershell and typemock are not opensource), pragmatic .net, open minds .net. None of them seem to give the same visibility or stick as alt.net does. Thinking about this after the conference, perhaps Open .NET is a good name, suggesting open minds, being open to new ideas and open to applying independent/opensource tools.

Although most Alt.NET discussion focus around tools that are posters of the Alt.NET community such as NHibernate, Castle and such, lots of the topics on this conference were not tool oriented, which surprised me a bit. Domain-driven design, scaling agile development, configuration management and deployment were among the most popular sessions. I expected to see a lot of interest in agile acceptance testing, but I was surprised by the fact that two out of four sessions in the largest room were devoted to that, making it probably the biggest topic of the conference. Since that is currently the focus of my work, it was great to get a chance to exchange ideas with so many people there. I think that the key idea to take away from those talks is that agile acceptance testing is something that business people, developers and testers need to get involved in and that developers cannot solve that problem in isolation. Here are some of the links for the stuff that I mentioned:

• My experiment with the five-point star image
• Robert C. Martin and Grigori Melnik: Tests and Requirements, Requirements and Tests: a Mobius Strip
• Martin Fowler and Dan North:The Yawning Crevasse of Doom
• TextTest tool which analyses log files
• Domain-specific testing languages presentation from SolutionsIQ at Agile 2008
• Concordion tool that works on custom HTML markups
• Green Pepper, an alternative to FitNesse that integrates with Jira and Confluence
• Exploring Requirements: Quality Before Design
• Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs
• Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash (Addison-Wesley Signature Series)

My idea of the example-writing workshop, previously called acceptance-testing threesome but changed after complaints about political correctness, seemed to cause some misunderstanding and I get the feeling that people are somehow comparing it to the big design up-front anti-pattern, which is a complete mistake. I’ll put together a blog post explaining my idea in a lot more detail soon, so monitor the rss feed on this site to see when it comes up.

Here are some other very nice posts with conference notes and write-ups:

• Ian Smith
• Mike Hadlow
• Mark Needham
• David Laing

Feeling the pulse of the community and catching up with what others are doing and which tools they are using was the theme of the day for most people, judging from the closing session. For me,
it was absolutely great to catch up with so many familiar faces and meet lots of new ones. I am really looking forward to the next open conference like this.

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