Yesterday evening, we had the first Eclipse Stammtisch of 2013 here in Braunschweig. Since the topic in November (using e4 to write an application) was so well received, we stayed on the e4 track for this event. Sebastian Goebel presented the work they've been doing on migrating their application from an Eclipse 3-based framework to Eclipse 4. The "exotic" part - they are using Swing as a GUI toolkit.

One of the things that I love about the Eclipse community is when a talk includes the sentence "we saw this at a Demo Camp and decided to try it out". That's just what happened to Sebastian and his team - after seeing Kai Tödter's prototype for Swing renderers for e4, they realised that was just what they needed. After all, even though Swing is officially on its way out, their first consideration is to migrate their underlying platform. That way, they can gain the benefits of a more modern standard (that would be e4 ) without losing all of the work they've done on their GUI components - including custom controls and behaviour.

Sebastian gave a report of their progress up to now - after a three-week proof-of-concept phase, the decision was made that the move was feasible, and they're expecting the release to happen this summer. At a later point, they may move to JavaFX, but that's a different story.

Eclipse and Swing may seem like an unlikely pairing for some, but Sebastian's team have been using an Eclipse-based framework for years, and the work of people such as Kai Tödter and the Eclipse Scout team show that it's still of interest to the community. The most pleasing aspect for me though, was to hear that the prototype for Eclipse 4 + Swing was testable with Jubula / GUIdancer out-of-the-box, just like we found out for Scout applications .

This year was the first year of the Agile Dev Practices conference in Potsdam, and although I could only make it for one day, I took a great deal back from the talks and the people I met.

Keynote - Practices and Principles

The format of the keynote was great - using cartoon potatoes to represent members of the agile team. Andrea made some good points about what following a practice without understanding the principle behind it can do. If stand up meetings feel like control meetings, planning meetings feel like being shot at with stories, and retrospectives feel like you have to defend yourself, then something is very wrong. I liked his point about agile being about capacity management - you can't make (some old type of) printer print more than 6 pages a minute, and any attempt to do so will result in a paper jam. He talked about the team pulling from the backlog instead of having things pushed on them, and I liked that too. I'd argue that teams starting out with agile will usually (have to) begin with the practices. They should review them frequently ensure they are really in line with the principles (kind of like introducing agile iteratively) - but his warning signs are valid for all teams, regardless how long they've been together.

Agile Test Automation at Xing

This talk was an overview of how teams work at Xing, with a focus on the test automation for the mobile applications. It is fascinating to me that there are separate teams to work on separate applications - it clashes with the "write once, run anywhere" principle that we know from the desktop - and that I know BREDEX has as its aim for mobile development and test automation as well. Unfortunately I didn't get to chat to Sergej for very long because of the next talk, but he did make the point about different user circles and their expectations from an app. I'll be interested to hear from other mobile talks how other teams deal with cross-platform development and testing.

Exploratory testing for developer, testers and you

I was undecided about whether to attend this talk, because I've heard various talks on exploratory testing. I enjoy them, but I was unsure about whether I'd learn something new. I was so glad I went! I liked the very logical explanation of automating what we know to make sure we always know it, and using exploratory testing to find out what we don't know we don't know (second order ignorance). The real benefit from this session for me was session-based test management (SBTM). I'd heard about it before, but had never really been able to understand how to put it into practice. As luck would have it, our team had made the decision to have a "Test Day" just last week, and suddenly SBTM fell into place for me. Meike, Markus and Sven from Atlassian gave me some excellent tips after the talk, and we're going to try it out next Monday for our Test Day.

Dialogue Sheets for retrospection

This was a workshop using Allan Kelly's dialogue sheets to guide teams through a retrospection. I enjoyed the sheets - and the most useful part for me was chatting to the others in the team about our problems. I shared some of our current problems and got some good tips, and was able to share some solutions we've tried. A good session.

Aiming Higher - using test automation to drive better quality

This was the talk I held. As a non-developer, I was a little nervous about speaking to a room of developers - especially on a topic that can be translated as "how to take little steps to get benefits and use them as leverage to get the team to do more for CI and continuous testing". As it turned out though, I had a good mix of roles, and even the developers listened with open ears

Seriously though, the talk was about taking a very agile approach to test automation. Every little step already brings benefits - even if the whole aim isn't achieved. Sometimes the person or people driving the test automation need leverage to get the tools (in an abstract sense) they need, and I hope the talk provided some nuggets of information to take home.

Home was the operative word after the talk - I had to leave before the last keynote. But, the day was well worth it, and I'm looking forward to putting the things I learned into practice.