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Just heard that Ray Ozzie will also be talking at Mix this year. If you don't know, Ray Ozzie is Microsoft's Chief Architect - taking over after Bill Gates. I've followed Ray's career for a very long time - since the days of Lotus Notes (which he created) and Groove (which is still ahead of its time... even though Microsoft has done absolutely nothing with the product since they purchased it - which is sad).
I have to admit, Ray Ozzie isn't the most exciting presenter in the lineup - however, I think along with Guthrie, he'll be the most profound. With the speakers that they have lined up - I truly hope Microsoft drops some huge news on our laps...something that will really blow us away and keep us excited.
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Miguel Carrasco is speaking at the Winnipeg .NET UG on Jan 29th about Silverlight and WPF. You should check it out if you are in the area.
For more info - www.dotnetwired.com
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Check out this tool from SmartBear
http://www.smartbearsoftware.com/codecollab.php
I can see this being a great tool for remote teams. If you have experience with it, let me know.
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DevTeach is a world class conference (I'm not just saying that because I'm speaking at it - really) that originally was held in my favourite Canadian city - Montreal. This year, DevTeach has branched out to Vancouver and Toronto.
This year I'll be giving two sessions:
1. How to make Scrum Really Work
2. Using Excel, the BDC, Dashboard Web Parts, and TFS
This conference is JAMMED with some amazing speakers and sessions. Mike Diehl, who works with me at Imaginet, is also speaking (Unit Testing with Team System - don't miss this..).
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I've heard a lot of great things about MIX from other MS RD's who have gone in the past. This year I decided I'm checking it out for myself.
http://visitmix.com/2008/default.aspx
The conference is from March 5-7 (which is perfect since it doesn't blow an entire week - or weekend for that matter) in Vegas at the Venetian. There are a bunch of sessions that I'm going to try to attend - likely more than I'll have time for. Will be interesting staying at the Venetian as well....
Cheers!
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Elisabeth Hendrickson provides a lightning talk regarding how important automated acceptance testing is.
For what it's worth, I agree with her. Automated acceptance tests are very important. So, why don't more teams do this? It has been my experience that many teams evolve quickly to perfect a developer centric view of testing - focusing on the testing of interfaces, classes, methods, etc. Teams work hard to integrate these tests into automated builds and really rally around making "tests" first class citizens during the development process. This is absolutely necessary; however, the evolution of an automated testing mindset should not stop there. In too many teams, any form of automated testing begins and ends with developers. When the development team releases the software to the acceptance phase they hand it over to the BA's who run through scores of manual tests (or simply perform exploratory testing) to find defects. Of course, this is a lot of work - and because of this I have often seen organizations provide for this by creating a really long QA "phase" of a project - where all acceptance testing is done at the same time. All of a sudden, this seems very "waterfally" in nature - which kinda blows the entire point.
The problem with automated acceptance tests is that they are relatively hard to create and, more significantly, hard to maintain. I have seen many projects attempt to fully automated all functional tests - using large teams of QA specialists to create and maintain the tests. This was EXTREMELY hard work and in many cases did NOT provide the expected results. In fact, on many projects test case maintenance added an enormous amount of effort and time onto the project - and resulted in an extremely NON-AGILE attitude about requirement change (small changes in requirements may be simple to code however result in a lot of work for those maintaining the automated acceptance tests - therefore the "cost of change" becomes quite significant and thus change is discouraged).
When I look to the future, I want to see a much improved emphasis on a fully integrated experience for creating and maintaining automated acceptance tests.
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Just like Guy (congrats Guy)
Check me out on The Region
I can't even remember how long I've been an RD - I think it is 5 years now. Being a Microsoft Regional Director has been extremely rewarding - mostly because of the peer network I've formed through the group - not to mention the amazing treatment we get from Microsoft and the influence we get to have on new and emerging technologies and products.
Microsoft Regional Directors rock!
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Last year I presented on Team Based Development at TechEd - I found a link to the recorded presentation today. You will be prompted to download the video.