DanNorth.net

Last October I was privileged to give a keynote talk at the Øredev conference in Malmö, Sweden. It was a late substitution. The original speaker, testing guru James Bach, had to cancel at the last minute for personal reasons. I felt pretty intimidated stepping into his shoes, especially since the other keynote presenters were Joel Spolsky and Andy Hunt, but I figured since no-one had heard of me I’d probably slip under the radar.

James was planning to talk about best practices, and it seems we have similar opinions about them. I would encourage you to read his wonderful blog article where he rigourously deconstructs the phrase¹, and then just as eloquently picks apart the arguments of anyone who disagrees. So I thought I would do something around the same topic.

I wrote it up as an article and the kind folks at InfoQ published it, and the Øredev team has put up a video of the talk. (For some reason I can’t get it to work in firefox on ubuntu, but I’m pretty sure the guy on the left is me).

¹ I didn’t realise until long after Øredev that he was the author of that article. It made me very happy when I found out.

I’ve been pretty slack at letting people know about upcoming talks. I could blame workload or burnout or any number of other plausible-sounding reasons, but a lot of it is just down to not prioritising very well. I should fix that.

A couple of years ago Joe Walnes and I gave a talk at an XP Day entitled “Awesome Acceptance Testing” (blame Joe for the title). We looked at motivations for acceptance testing and discussed various strategies, tools and techniques. But mostly it was an opportunity to get a bunch of people in a room and find out what they thought and what they were up to in the acceptance testing space.

If you didn’t get to see it and it sounds like fun, we’ll be rerunning the session at SPA 2008 in March. I hope to see you there.