Agile 2008 - sessions

So I would like to list the sessions I went to, at Agile 2008, in Toronto last week, and what I thought of them. ( if you would like the full description of each session you can look it up on the agile website .
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Session: TDD Clinic: BDD, Ruby, & Rails:

This talk was a tutorial on how to use BDD (behaviour driven development) within the Ruby on Rails (RoR) framework.
It was a very good practical introduction into TDD (Test Driven Development) in general as well as specifically for RoR.

TDD gives us:

• Automated software testing
• Confidence that our software does what we say it does
• The ability to make changes and verify that it hasn't affected other functionality (e.g. NOT like our current LIMS)

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Styles of TDD: First Tests

This was a rather useless “workshop” where we sat around talking about how to start writing tests.

If anything, it shows that we should be careful who we consider to be "experts" and who we hire for training.

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Session: XUnit Test Patterns and Smells; Improving Test Code and Testability Through Refactoring

• Design Patterns And smells
• Unit Testing code And smells
• Design patterns of the testing code

This is useful in any further activity that should involve unit testing. It will also help enhancing and avoiding pitfalls in sherpa unit testing code and approach. it was definetly a worthwhile talk. I recommend it for anyone who is struggling with maintaining her testing code.
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Session: Domain Specific Testing Languages

• Domain Specific Testing Languages (DSTLs) express customer requirements as tests with the scope, granularity, and transparency you need.

• push users to drive their test cases by:
• understanding their terminology.
• provide them with a language to describe what they want their application to do.
• for example : how do you describe a test case for brushing your teeth

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Agile Development Practices for Dynamic Languages

This talk was on how to apply AGILE practices for dynamic languages.

It turned out to be less than useful as the speak spent most of the time discussing the differences between Static and Dynamic typed languages.
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Skills for the Agile Designer

This session focused on developing skills used when starting a new Agile project.

The exercise was to write up the main challenges of a project individually and then discuss in a group the challenges we saw.

It acted to illustrate the differences between peoples backgrounds and experiences. Furthermore it aided in bringing forward challenges that team members did not even think of initially.

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Session : Exploring user stories through mind mapping

this session is highly recommened, for more details on this go to this page from the speaker.