Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Thu, 06 Apr 2006

Extreme Test Makeover

During one of the days of Agile2006, Bill Wake and I will be hosting a set of "extreme test makeovers." Throughout the day, we'll have makeover artists who are experts in unit and acceptance testing, with tools like Fit, JUnit, NUnit, Watir, and more. Some of the people who've expressed interest in helping touch up tests are Brian Button, Ward Cunningham, Janet Gregory, Ron Jeffries, Rick Mugridge, Bret Pettichord, Charlie Poole, and Jim Shore.

The idea is that people will bring their laptop, already loaded with tests that can be run. Best would be tests for real product code; that way, you can go back to work and justify the conference trip by slapping your laptop down on your boss's desk and showing improved tests. Tests for any substantial chunk of code are OK, though.

Did I mention that people should bring tests that can be run? That's really important.

Sessions will be 90 minutes each, with five minutes for expert speechifying at the beginning and ten minutes to record lessons learned and stick them up on the wall.

For at least some of the sessions, we'll provide some way for observers to see what's happening (a projector and a microphone).

We'll have a signup sheet at the conference, but I've also started a mailing list where people with tests (that can be run at the conference) can hook up with makeover artists. It's http://groups.yahoo.com/group/test-makeover. People who want to help out can also announce that there.

There may also be informal sessions after the formal ones.

## Posted at 20:49 in category /conferences [permalink] [top]

The Gordon Pask Award 2006

Each year at the Agile200X Conference, the Agile Alliance presents the Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice. Here's its description:

The Gordon Pask Award recognizes two people whose recent contributions to Agile Practice demonstrate, in the opinion of the Award Committee, their potential to become leaders of the field. The award comes with a check for US$5000.

Last year's recipients were:

J. B. Rainsberger, for spending a great deal of time helping people on the testdrivendevelopment mailing list, for writing JUnit Recipes, for XP Day Toronto, and for being the Agile2005 tutorial chair.

Jim Shore, for his performance as a paper shepherd; for a fine experience report he gave at ADC2003 that, together with his blog, suggest a cast of thought that deserves cultivation; for his work on the Fit specification and the C# version of Fit; and for being a person who holds the Fit world together by doing the sort of organizational and cleanup tasks that are usually thankless.

You can see that we are looking for people who provide both ideas and actions. We want people who are advancing the state of the practice. But we also want people who are spreading knowledge of the existing state of the practice, so that Agile teams know what more there is to learn. And we also want people who are helping people on a personal level, not just at the abstract level of ideas.

Send nominations making the case for a particular person to pask-nominations@agilealliance.org The deadline for nominations is May 31.

## Posted at 20:14 in category /conferences [permalink] [top]