Eric Lefevre posted a message to the CITCON mailing list today sharing some information about the upcoming CITCON Amsterdam. We currently have a very similar registration level to where CITCON Brussels ended up last year, but we have more than 2 months to go! I think we’ve every reason to expect great things out of this event… Interested in joining us in Amsterdam in October? Then sign up!
On the CruiseControl users mailing list Adam asked for a simple label incrementer that would work with a single character in a series (”a”, “b”, “c”, etc.). Simple enough, but not worth adding to the project, so here it is, test (first) and code.
(Suggestions for better sites for sharing code snippets?)
Back in 2006 Alistair Cockburn and I gave a talk at SDBP on “Creating Change one Tic-Tac at a Time”. As I wrote at the time this talk incorporated ideas from lots of different sources, and I’ve drawn on these ideas on many occasions since then. Most recently I shared some of the slides at CITCON Melbourne during a session on “The People Side of CI“. 
I’ve always intended to write a longish blog/article/thing explaining and expanding on the ideas from the original talk and what I’ve learned since (including what came up at the Agile 2007 discovery session). But this isn’t that thing. Instead David Smart, one of the facilitators of the CITCON session, reminded me that I said I’d share the slides. So here are the slides as pdf, and a public commitment to provide more explanation in a future entry.
Rob Hunter blogged about my blog entry on the iPhone meetup where he showed off Scribular. I remember just enough of my one semester of Scheme to find this blog entry funny.
Last night I attended a really neat event, the Silicon Valley iPhone Developers mislabeled WWDC Roundup. The only way for the title to make sense is that the speakers were people that organizer Tim Burks (creator of the cool Nu programming language) was able to roundup at WWDC. The panel was composed of:
I loved the event because all of the developers were so charmingly wide-eyed, so stunned and obviously loving what they are doing and the opportunity the see in front of them. David is excited by making novel interactive and social music based software. Steve is still amazed at the response he’s had to the
YouTube video of his app Trisim, over 260,000 views. Ramin was showing off PhotoFrolic — take picture, “augment”, share — to people outside his house for the very first time. Rob was able to create on the iPhone an idea he’d had in 2003. And Mike Lee is obviously loving the opportunity to round-up the best developers and pull them into a much more ambitious iPhone startup that the others on display, all for his end goal of reforesting Madagascar.
A couple things I found particularly interesting:
- Of all the panelists only Mike Lee had previous experience with Objective-C and Cocoa. Steve is a .NET developer. Ramin Python/Django. Rob wrote his backend web service in Scheme for god sake. Which brings me to…
- All of the applications under discussion have their own backend web service. I’ve ranted to a few friends lately that the future of web apps is native code, and this was an eloquent demonstration
Tapulous’s FriendBook app is a great example. Itallows you to exchange contact information by handshaking your iPhones at each other. But this isn’t some local data beaming! In the coffee shop/airport setting you might be on different wireless networks (3G vs Edge vs WiFi), so you’re making a remote call back to the cloud with your location and it matches two people in the same place making the same motion. Your web app have access to the accelerometer? I didn’t think so.
Anyway, great meeting, great group of people, and from what I saw we’re all going to be blown away with that AppStore finally opens.
Bret Pettichord announced his next big thing yesterday: WatirCraft, a company around the popular testing library Watir. In his announcement Bret explained that WatirCraft is making a few bets:
- “We are betting that we can build a business around making testers successful with automated testing.”
- “Pete and I are making a bet …[on] the vision … automation is about code and success requires understanding code, and making code understandable.”
- “We are also betting that people want and will be willing to pay for a framework that is easier to use.“
- “We are also betting on Ruby.”
- “We are also betting that the growing use of Agile Development practices will continue.”
- “We think testers do have a significant role in the future of automated testing.“
Based on my experiences over the years I think that Pete and Bret have made a lot of reasonable bets.
At Agitar we had literally hundreds of companies as customers, which is pretty significant when you realize that our prices started at around $35,000 and went up to seven figures. That’s a good indication that there’s a market for helping people succeed at testing their software.
From my time in QA doing test automation with the Mercury tools I agree that successful testing required actual coding. I think this has been a barrier to success with traditional automation attempts, at least in Silicon Valley. To be a successful required coding skills but if you had coding skills there was a higher paying higher prestige job waiting for you in development. It has gotten to the point that it is actually more difficult to find a good tester than it is to find a good developer because development is such a compelling brain drain.
But Bret’s right that agile development is the future and “testers on agile teams are being hammered by shorter iterations“. Because automated testing is so key to successful agile development I think this means market forces should swell the ranks of tester-developers and developer-testers. (Of course since I used to blog at DeveloperTesting.com it isn’t surprising that I feel this way…)
Finally I think WatirCraft is right to focus on the tester side of this equation. I was exposed to dozens of teams all over the world while at Agitar and what I saw was very consistent. There was widespread interest in developers testing their code but often only because you were supposed to as part of “going agile”. I saw only a few teams where the testing done by developers was considered to reduce traditional testing to any great extent. Companies want their developers developing, not testing, so I’d agree that the bulk of future test automation will belong to testers.
In a couple of days I’ll be heading down to Melbourne for CITCON’s 2008 Asia-Pacific event. While I’m there I’ll also be visiting the Victorian Java User Group on June 26th and giving a talk on (what else) Continuous Integration and Testing.
I’m very curious to see how this year’s A-P CITCON plays out. Last year’s event in Sydney was our largest event to date, but this year we have even more people registered. In fact this seems like it will be the first event where we will need to close registration and turn people away! On the other hand the crowd in Sydney last year was also the least familiar with the Open Space concept. While it all turned out fine there was some rough spots (imho) when it came to activities like refactoring the schedule on Friday night. At most event there are enough people who understand the role of “schedule gnomes” to have things move smoothly without Paul and I getting involved, but in Sydney it took a bit of coaching to get that to happen. So I’m curious to see if with the larger crowd and the additional year we end up with a critical mass of people with Open Space experience or not.
I needed a blog to replace DeveloperTesting. It is frustrating to lose the history of posts and the Google status that was there at DeveloperTesting but there’s also something refreshing about a new start. Perhaps in time I’ll resurrect some of the posts that used to live there into a “greatest hits”, but until then please enjoy this clean uncluttered space.