Sep 19 2009
CITCON Europe 09
I just came back from CITCON Europe 09. It was a great experience and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I liked very much the fact that it was relatively small and very informal, with around 120 participants and openspace planning. This allowed me to put faces on a lot of blog authors and twitter users I follow and catch up with some great folks from the community.
It was very encouraging to see the rising interest in agile acceptance testing, and we ended up almost running a full track on the topic with 4 presentations on lots of different aspects. I learned about Thoughtworks Twist from Andy Yates and narrative testing ideas from Antony Marcano and Andy Palmer. A key take-away from the conference for me was probably Marcano’s idea of “saving the game”, building systems so that you can easily store a snapshot of the current state and go back to that later. I can see how this can significantly aid in all kinds of testing, including acceptance and exploratory, so I have to look for ways to implement that in my future projects. Exchanging experiences of how people do acceptance testing was also very valuable and, judging by the comments at the closing session, it looks as if quite a few people went away with some new ideas around it.
A special treat for me was being able to pick Steve Freeman’s brains on mock objects, learn what the original idea behind that was and what he thought were his biggest mistakes in using mock objects.
I also got to speak with JetBrains developers on optimising build dependencies in TeamCity, and from that I went away with the idea to convert dependencies from build triggers to snapshots to avoid diamond build issues and optimise the cycle. I’m a bit unconvinced about that solving my problem but I’ll sure give it a try.
In retrospect, it was time well spent. The only negative remark is that classrooms didn’t really work for me as a way to organise openspace discussion. Lucky that we usurped the big room with chairs set in a circle for two acceptance testing sessions. Thanks very much to everyone who participated in organising the conference and I hope to see you next time.
I took lots of notes at the conference and will be cleaning that up and posting articles here next week, so subscribe to my RSS feed to get notified about that.
 |
 |
