The call for paper for the AgileTestingDays 2010 is open, you can submit your proposal on the site.
I’m thinking in these days about a session on testing from a developer perspective.

The past week, Emanuele and I were in berlin to attend the agile testing days conference.
We made a speech about Continuous Integration, from theory to practice. It was my first “international” speech and it gone quite fine.
In those days I saw and I spoke with a lot of “agile-guru” like Tom and Mary Poppendieck and it was a beautiful experience.
The percept I had is that the rest of Europe is much more advanced than Italy about agile methodologies and theirs adoption.
For example, Sometimes when we go to our customers and suggest some agile practices, they look us in a strange way…I don’t know why? Some other speaker, instead, told me that in UK or in Germany, for example, the adoption of agile methodologies is almost a standard-de-facto and with their customers they speak about user stories or continuous integration in a natural way. I hope it will be like this also in Italy.

In conclusion, many thanks to Jose and all his staff for the great organization and…see you the next year!

Finally, we are in Berlin! Emanuele and I arrived yesterday, after a long travel.
It’s very cold: on saturday, I had a t-shirt on, today in Berlin it’s snowing almost.
Yesterday I had a half-marathon with Ema, but the first impact with this city is not so good…maybe for the rain, maybe for the weather or maybe because I woke up 24 hours before.
The conference starts and today is the tutorials-day…it’s a good chanche to finish my demo for wednesday

Stay tuned!

This afternoon, Emanuele and I have built the demo for the agile testing days.
Our idea is that to completely (more or less) reproduce the build environment that the team uses all days in our projects. The tasks that we have scheduled are:

- automatic assemblies versioning
- integrating database changes
- build
- running unit tests
- running integration tests
- deploying
- code metrics (and more over) with source monitor, fxcop and simian

The time available is not so much, and we have tried to choose must useful tasks (for us, obviously)
Any other ideas? Suggestions? Tasks that do you want to investigate?

From 12th to 14th I will be in Berlin for the Agile Testing Days not only as an attendee but also as a speaker.

With Alessandro I will present a session on Continuous Integration, a 60 minutes walkthrough on the setup process of a CI Server.

Here you can find the agenda of the days: http://www.agiletestingdays.com/programme.html

I will write more about our session in the next weeks on this blog.

In this period I’m teaching Test Driven Development in various teams in which this practice is unknown. During the course I use some non-Microsoft tools (mbUnit, RinhoMock, TestDriven.NET, …) and I see that one of the big obstacle is the use of these tools.

I ask myself why and the answer could be double.

The first answer is that the programmers are lazy and they don’t want to learn the use of new tools that are not always so easy to install and learn.

The second answer is that a lot of tools are not well integrated in the IDE and take time to get confident with their usage.

I think that for a massive use of these practices (Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration, the use of a Source Control System) the various supplier of these tools must do a little step to that lazy developers to give them the needed integration that a Microsoft developer wants. One alternative solution is to wait that Microsoft release some tools that are usable for these practices (and not too expensive!) and for what I see Visual Studio 2010 is on the right way.

The 21st Novembre in Bologna (Italy) there will be the 5th Italian Agile Day. I will be there and I will speak with Claudio about Test Driven Development.

And there will be an UgiALT.NET open space dedicated to the Agile Tools in the .NET World.

You must be there!

More infos here: http://www.agileday.it/index.php?page=program