On the panel discussion I understood Tom Gilb to call for more craftsmanship in the programming and testing world. What I have back in mind is that he called for more people to know what they’re doing rather than following the latest trends or fashions in the industry. Clearly I have in mind that he called for less engineering, but more craftsmanship. Did I confuse something there?

Kind regards
Markus Gärtner

We were 5 attendees from my company (acrolinx, Berlin), so we’ll make a debriefing to our colleagues who didn’t have the chance to attend the Agile Testing Days. I just discovered that I was about to paraphrase parts of your own feedback in my own talk.

Cons:
I was annoyed by Tom Gilb’s talk. Using numerous ugly slides, he repeated the same thing about his quality metrics applied to specification documents during a neverending session… I was sad for him (completely out), the audience (wasting time) and the organizers (who made a super great job otherwise).
Mike Gevers’ talk about performance testing wasn’t that “agile” in that she’s expecting a sort of BDUF (whole architecture in advance) to include her performance measurement tools (she has to rework her demos because they tend to say: “you’re braindead if you use such tools”). Moreover, her current experience is not included in an agile project but consists in late testing, as in predictive models.

Pros:
Elisabeth Hendrickson (who I didn’t know, but now I do) and The Poppendiecks (I’m following their adventures since _Implementing Lean Software Development_) talks were very… energizing.
Elisabeth Hendrickson approach on “Agile Testing” is really simple, so that anyone can explain it with a few words, without notes.
On a technical point of view, I was interested in the new ATDD tool called “Robot Framework”. I’ve been using FitNesse since 2004 but its ergonomics prevents adoption by impatient people as me. So I was looking for a better alternative, as Robot Framework and its IDE could be.

Thank you Gojko for the discussion we had about the Tester and Product Owner roles, and thanks again for giving me your book I’ll read in a couple of days.

My batteries are loaded for a couple of months and I hope both my colleagues and my company with get benefits from that.

Sincerely yours,
Régis

Great summary of the conference, Gojko. I agree 100%, and it was super to meet you and other people I only knew from the Internet! Your session was inspiring!