Scandinavian Developer Conference 2010

The programme for Scandinavian Developer Conference has just been published. I think we have a fantastic line up of speakers this year. I am particularly pleased Michael Feathers, Brian Marick and Diana Larsen have agreed to join us, and that this year my husband Geoff is also a speaker.

I have met Michael and Diana at many XP conferences over the years, but I missed Brian Marick the one time I was at the agile conference in North America, so I'm particularly interested to hear what he has to say. He has been very influential in the testing community, and invented the idea of testing quadrants, which I think is a very helpful way of thinking about testing.

Michael Feathers is known for his book "Working Effectively with Legacy Code", which I reviewed early drafts of back in like 2004. He and I also competed together in "Programming with the Stars" at agile2008. Michael works for Object Mentor, coaching teams in all things agile.

Diana Larsen is chairman of the agile alliance, and has written a book about retrospectives together with Esther Derby. I think I first met her at XP2005, when I attended her tutorial, which I remember as outstanding. It was very interactive and all about communication skills and teambuilding. Her job seems to be all about teaching the people skills needed for agile to work.

Geoff is going to be talking about texttest, which goes from strength to strength, and productive GUI testing with pyUseCase. Geoff has been doing an awful lot of work on this tool lately, and I am really excited about the possibilities it opens up for agile testing. I will have to write a separate post on that though, so watch this space :-)

Many of the other speakers are familiar faces who I look forward to meeting up with again - Bill Wake, (books about refactoring, XP and Ruby), Erik Lundh, (the earliest Swedish XP coach), Niclas Nilsson (ruby, programming guru), Jimmy Nilsson (Domain Driven Design book), Neal Ford (Thoughtworks, productive programmer book), Thomas Nilsson, (CTO, Responsive, linköping), Ola Ellnestam (CEO, Agical, stockholm), Marcus Ahnve (programming guru), Chris Hedgate (programming guru)...

I'm also very pleased that I'm going to be speaking again this year, after the success of my previous presentation on "clean code". This year I hope to talk about agile testing and how best to approach it.

One of the reasons I keep going back to the XP conference is the amount of interaction and discussion generated by the many workshops and open space sessions. There are very few straight talks, and all are either presentations of academic papers, or keynotes. When I saw the proposed programme for SDC a couple of weeks ago, I felt it was lacking something. Eight parallel tracks of presentations is all very well, but where is the interaction, the whole reason to go to a conference and not just watch presentations on infoq? So I proposed a ninth "track", devoted to discussion, called "conversation corner". Luckily my colleagues at iptor, who are organizing the conference, liked my idea.

To get the conversations going, I am organizing four "fishbowl" style discussions, seeded by conference speakers. I've picked topics that interest me, and invited other conference speakers, who I think are also interested in these topics, to join me.

I am hoping that after participating in one or two of my fishbowls, some conference attendees might feel comfortable proposing discussions of their own. To that end there will be a board with timeslots and index cards, so people can write up their topic, assign it to an empty timeslot, and hence invite more people to join them.

It won't be full blown open space, there will be no opening meeting with everyone, or two minute pitches proposing sessions. I won't be explaining the law of two feet or the open space rules. But it is a step in that direction, and I hope a complement to the organized speeches going on in the rest of the conference.

Perhaps you'd like to join us at the conference? Register here.

Iptor

It occurred to me that I should mention that I now work for Iptor Konsult AB rather than IBS JavaSolutions. This is not due to my changing jobs, rather that IBS decided that since we don't do the same things as the rest of the company, we should have a separate name and image. We are even going to be a separate legal entity, although still wholly owned by IBS.

I think it's a very positive development for both parties, and I personally am much more comfortable standing up and presenting myself as from Iptor than I ever was when it was IBS JavaSolutions. For a start it's not also the name of a rather unpleasant illness, and secondly it means I can avoid mentioning Java. A language I now work with daily, but don't enjoy nearly so much as python.

In practice though, the name change probably won't make that much difference in my daily life.

TextTest progress

When I wrote this post about the public Texttest nightjob statistics, I thought they were a bit confusing and hard to understand. Geoff has now rewritten the page to contain fewer numbers, and just report the passed and failed tests from the previous night. I think it's a bit easier to read now. He has also ditched about 500 tests that were running on Solaris, since that platform is not used often, and these tests never found bugs that weren't also found on Linux.

The statistics are still pretty impressive though, don't you think?

TestNG - my opinions

It's Java Forum next week, here in Göteborg. I'm giving a short talk about TestNG, a tool I've been using lately.

My basic conclusion is that TestNG is a very easy step from JUnit, and one you don't need to take if all your tests are true unit tests (ie fast and independant). TestNG has some nice features which help when your tests are slow and/or have external dependencies, especially if they are mixed together in the same test classes as true unit tests. I think it's pretty useful for unit and integration tests. (aka quadrant 1, technology facing).

Having said that, what bothers me about TestNG is that it means your test code is written in Java. For me, that makes it unsuitable for for system tests, (aka quadrant 2, business facing). If you have anything resembling an involved customer, you're going to at least want to encourage them to read the system tests to verify they are correct, and to gain confidence that the system is working. Truly agile teams have these people helping write tests. Many customer types won't be happy working with Java. You might be able to get by, though, if you have descriptive test names, good javadoc, and test data in separate files that they can read.

Rather than spending time learning TestNG, I think you may get more payback from tools such as Fitnesse, Robot or TextTest, which all allow you to get customers involved in reading and even writing tests. I think it could be a perfectly sensible choice to stick with JUnit for unit tests, and use one of these tools for both integration and system tests. What you choose will of course depends on the situation, for example the size of the system, the nature of the test data, and how many tools your team is willing to learn.

Video of "Varför går man till en Coding Dojo?"

I spoke at Smidig2009 about a month ago, and they have now put up videos of all the talks. So I just had the uncanny experience of watching myself speak (here is a link to it). I'm sure my swedish accent sounds better in my head when I'm talking, but I do apparently get my point across, since about a dozen people turned up to do a code kata with me in the open space in the afternoon.

JFokus

I've just heard that I've been accepted as a speaker at JFokus, in Stockholm in January. I'll be saying something about how to write good tests using Selenium, a tool I've been using a fair amount lately. I'm looking forward to the chance to meet up with the wider Java community in Sweden and find out what's new and what's hot.

Smidig 2009

I'm off to Oslo on Wednesday for Smidig 2009. They've just announced the programme, which consists of lightning talks in the morning, and open space in the afternoons. I'll be giving a lightning talk on Friday morning about why you might want to go to a coding dojo. I'm hoping there will be enough interest to run a Randori/dojo in the afternoon. Someone commented that there have been dojo meetings in Oslo before, so I'll be interested to find out if they do them the same way I've been doing them.

The conference talks are mostly going to be in Norwegian, but mine isn't the only item in Swedish. I spotted Ola Ellnestam (agical) and Thomas Nilsson (responsive) on the list too. So if it turns out that I find spoken Norwegian totally incomprehensible, there will be a few people I can talk to!