My last speaking conference for the year was the Agile Testing Days held in Potsdam on the outskirts of Berlin. In terms of conference history, this was its fourth year of running and attracts a lot of the big names in agile testing circles, as one would expect from the name. For me, as a test-infected developer , I found it fascinating to see what concerns the testing audience and I felt many common themes around whether or not testing was important, the difference between an agile tester and a normal tester, and of course a focus on collaboration and working iwth other roles.

They had three keynotes a day, a pretty overwhelming number considering that there were multiple tracks and sessions. I don’t think I would do much justice trying to summarise them all but I’ll share a number of highlights that I took away. Jurgen Appelo spoke about the stories behind his books. He’s an entertaining speaker, very well prepared and I feel very in agreement with his “all models are broken but some are useful” approach to collecting different software methodologies and giving a go at lots of different things. Just as the community is continuing to expand beyond just software development, his focus is also pointing upwards into the upper hierarchies of management – to those with the money, budget and decisioning making authority. He’s invented something he’s calling the “management workout” although I shudder at this after seeing it associated (read: abused) by a very hierarchical organisation very much into command and control. Ask me about it one day if you see me in person.

I also appreciated Gojko’s keynote presentation challenging existing thoughts on collecting information, metrics and that all we are doing is improving the process of software development, not necessarily the product. His argument feels very similar to the lean start up movement that why bother putting quality around features we aren’t even sure are useful by anyone, or not validated. He quoted a number of clients he’s seen who throw away automated testing suite in favour of measuring impact on business metrics and trends – using that to work out regressions. It’s an interesting approach that requires a) businesses to actually identify their real business metrics (very rare in my opinion) and b) link features to these metrics and c) measure them very carefully for changes. I guess this also goes along with his new book on Impact Mapping to work out where to put the effort.

He also criticised the testing quadrants, argued that we’re collecting the wrong data, points out that exploratory testing is still testing the process (not the product) and that most organisations are missing feedback once they go live. He also came up with his own adaptation on the Maslo’s hierarchy of needs in terms of software. It starts off with building deployable/functional software, then it should meet performance/security needs, then be usable, followed by useful and then followed by successful. He also recommended a book new to me, called “The Learning Alliance: Systems Thinking in Human Resource Development”

I ran my session, TDDing Javascript Front Ends shortly after a BDD session that complemented the idea very well. The previous session focused on why/what and not the how, where mine was a good depth into how you do it from a hands on practitioner point of view. I had a number of good questions and people after the talk that gave me some great feedback and encouraged me to do more. The only shame was that the session was limited to 45minutes and the tutorial that I run with is normally achievable. I look forward to people taking the online tutorial (found here) and then passing in even more feedback.