Distilling Scotland

Scotland on Rails ‘09 is in the bag.

Loved BDDConf

Alan, Graeme, and Paul made one track of the first afternoon all about agile testing. I kicked it off with my talk which laid the basis by introducing BDD concepts, as well as capturing several BDD anti-patterns that I have discovered, followed by Joseph Wilk’s brilliant presentation on Cucumber and acceptance testing, Eric Smith presenting on Selenium, and Kevin Barnes presenting on Object Daddy (a.k.a., How I learned to love factories and get over fixtures).

There were many BDD discussions that I found my way into after that first day. Joseph and I had a splendid chat about choosing tools to that facilitate your personal design process, best faciltate customer interaction, and expedite your development process. Obviously, the answer was frequently “it depends”; however, the discussion itself was delightfully thought-provoking.

I later discussed BDD with the elabs team (CJ, Jonas, Anders, and Jimmy), Paul Wilson, and even the almighty… er… I mean Jim Weirich.

The random discussions between small, sets of participants, makes conferences worthwhile for me. Certainly presentations can provide some broad strokes outlining a problem or solution. However, far more detail can be uncovered through a discussion between a small group of interested individuals. An added bonus is that these little side discussions are a great way to get to know other Rubyists!

And what better way than lynching or being eaten by them within the context of a game of Werewolf? ;-)

Alan indicated that next year will be a “Ruby conf” as opposed to a “Rails conf”. I’m looking forward to it!

Posted by evan on Monday, March 30, 2009

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