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The Quest

For the past few days I've been writing down my thoughts on this weekends CITCON Asia/Pacific conference in Sydney (pronounced kit-kon rather than sit-con as I initially called it) and seem to have been going in circles finding little gems to recall and comment on...

Open Spaces

CITCON was my second Open Spaces style event, the first being Kiwi Foo/Baa Camp organized by Nat Torkington back in February and I was interested in seeing the differences and similarities between the two as far as timetable self organization went. One thing I noticed as we all sat in a circle and introduced ourselves was that where Baa Camp had a mixture of ruby, perl, python, .NET and Java developers CITCON was almost entirely represented by Java with a few C/C++/.NET folk - there seemed to be a definite lacking of people from the dynamic camp. With the bias towards java I had a fear of a lot of time table clashes - surprisingly there were little clashes with only a few sessions targeting specific toolsets: Mark Chaimungkalanont's session on JWebUnit and my own session on TestNG.

TestNG

I'm not really one for public speaking (having failed almost all such classes as high school or tech) which lead me to be slightly freaked out as I saw 10 or so votes against my name for the TestNG presentation. The session was first up at 10am and had 15 or so attenders (almost more than we get at our Auckland Java Community meetings) in which I gave a brief introduction to TestNG's features beyond the simple test: groups, properties, data providers, dependencies, listeners and annotation transformers. My pro-testng leanings were balanced out with group discussion and a demonstration of driving JUnit4 from Groovy from Paul King.

Introducing Continuous Integration

My favorite session of the weekend tackled the right mix of practices and tools for introducing continuous integration to an organization - the conversation read much like an AA 12 step program as we identified several key steps:

• Recognize the current process has problems (both small and large).
• Reach a consensus agreement of the problems and that everyone wants to change/improve.
• Identify the outcomes/improvements/goals the team wish to reach
• Understand how each problem affects the team (and what on flowing affects they cause).
• Change simple things first...

The full list is available on the wiki.

I spoke briefly on growing trust and faith in the quality/stability of the code you working on and how the more you can trust your code the more freedom you have to refactor, experiment, and deploy changes. I have more to say/write on this topic and the more I think on it the more twisted my thoughts become - I'm sure it'll make an interesting post when I've finished with it.

Testing Web Applications

Mark Chaimungkalanont's session on testing web applications with JWebTest was one of the most attended and interesting sessions of the day. Mark demonstrated an internally developed script recording tool for easing the pain of writing your tests - very nice looking, hopefully it will get released as open source sometime?

As additional demonstrations of Watir and other web testing tools were discussed Mark asked if anyone had experience with Selenium and could share - remembering I had a working SeleniumRC setup for one of $work's applications on the laptop I jumped in and gave an impromtu walk through of recording tests with Selenium IDE and then running with running and debugging with TestNG/IntelliJ IDEA (Open Spaces style events are great for things like this - want to hijack a session and contribute? step right up!)

After the session I was asked how much Selenium costs by a user of Quick Test Pro ad was greatly amused by the shock and awe light up his face as I gave the response "its free and open source": widened eyes, jaw dropping, the momentary silence of a deeply drawn in breath of disbelief. I only wish I could have said I wrote it :)

The Crawl Home

Following the retrospective ending of CITCON a group of us "out of town folk" hopped a few bars and restaurants for drinks and dinner, sore legs, and a pitiful attempted mugging of my camera (so pitiful I didn't even pause or sidestep to avoid his lethargic groping).

The Quest

Sunday morning saw me venture out to Hillsong City Church to hear Robert Fergusson speak on "The Quest" - his journal to Antarctica following the footsteps of Ernest Shackleton as part of the "Modern Day Parables" series. It was interesting to find various crossover elements between Robert's message and the discussions of CITCON (some of which will be spoken about in the post of trust and faith in code).

CITCON Asia/Pacific 2007 was a great experience, from both a presenting and education perspective and I'm already putting into practice more things I learnt from the weekend. Roll on CITCON 2008!

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