So, that’s it. My first day at Agile 2011 conference in Salt Lake City just ended. There are certainly a lot of interesting things going on here, and some really bright people as well.

My day started with a 3 hours session by Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin (in a cast because of a broken ankle, rolling around on her trolley). The session was titled
“Hooray, We’re Agile Testers! What’s Next? Advanced Topics in Agile Testing”

In this session, Janet and Lisa asked people in the room to write down the issues they are facing the most in terms of testing and to sort them out into 5 main categories

• Cultural issues
• What the customer wants
• Keeping up
• Big systems
• What else

After grouping the sticky notes and exposing the main themes, they gave some pointers on how to solve this or that kind of issues. I must admit I didn’t get much out of this since I have attended other conferences dedicated to testing like the Agile Testing Days in Berlin where most of the subjects were covered into more details. Two things I got out of it though were the ideas of story mapping and and mind mapping. I will have to look into this in more details. I am not a tester myself, but in the team I work with, we have a common responsibility in terms of testing, and all in all, I am here to get new ideas.

The session was organized as a workshop, so we also had a few group activities. Unfortunately the audience was a little bit too big, the groups too large, and the room too small and noisy too really enjoy the exercise.

After a one hour lunch break with most appreciated food despite the queuing, I went to see Uncle Bob’s talk on his new idea he calls The Transformation Priority Premise. I had read his blog post a couple of months ago, and even started to prepare a post myself on the subject, that I didn’t really ever finished.

The talk pretty much covered the exact same thing you can read in the article, but with Bob’s way of presenting it live on a stage, all dressed up in his red T-shirt, brown shorts and white socks (no shoes on). He of course introduced the subject by talking about lasers and photons and stuff that most probably only 5 people in the audience really understood, to move on to the subject when he asked us to code the word wrap kata waiting for us to get stuck in a lock jam.

The whole idea of Transformation Priority is that there exist small transformations that you can apply to your code and that these transformations can be ordered with a certain priority to avoid this kind of lock jam. In opposition to refactorings which change the code without changing the behavior, transformations actually change the implementation in small steps that allow you to make the test pass. Applying the transformations using a certain priority between them, meaning when two transformations are possible to make the test pass, always pick the one which is higher in the list, leads to what Bob calls self assembling algorithm.

I will not get into details about the transformations and their priority, you can read Bob’s article for that. I just want to state that I find the idea really interesting. As Bob says, the list of transformations he put down might no be complete and the priorities might change, but just imagine what it could bring if we all have this in mind when using TDD. We could have tools that would help us write better and more simple code, preventing us to do too big a step at a time. You will never have to track you steps back when you get stuck using TDD because you avoid the problem in the first place.Pleasant idea, isn’t it ?

“As your tests get more specific, the code gets more generic”. Bob proved his point with the bowling score kata where he wrote the score calculation algorithm in 14 lines of code with one loop and two if statements. How simple is that ?

I left Uncle Bob’s talk quite impressed by his insights only to find him again a few minutes later for what might already be the peak of the conference, the reunion of 15 of the original 17 people who gathered 10 years ago to write this thing that changed our whole industry that is the Agile Manifesto.

Seeing all of them on stage was a great experience, and a funny one too. After a short introduction of Uncle Bob (him again) and Alistair Cockburn where they explain how they triggered the meeting where it all started, all of them 15 relayed each other on a park bench to answer some of the audience’s questions. To the question “What would you change to the manifesto today if you had the chance”, most of them answered “nothing”, except Ward Cunningham who said he had learned a few things about web pages since then, and that he would actually change the background of the page to be a little more printer friendly

This went on for more than one hour, answers alternating between serious stuff and jokes. Uncle Bob said the only agenda they had when starting the meeting ten years ago was to come up with a manifesto, which actually happened, making this meeting according to him “the only good meeting he had in his career”.

Yes, they are a little disappointed to see some companies or some teams pretending they do Agile when they are actually not. No Agile and Lean are not the same, even though Agile is Lean. Yes there is an “I” in team and it’s the fact that all individuals of a team make efforts that make the team good if not great.

One of the interesting questions that was asked what about Agile in the next 10 years. Some think that Agile will span over software development and reach other fields of activity to eventually bring concepts such as the agile enterprise into life. Some say that they would like to think that Agile has become so evident to anyone 10 years from now that it actually disappeared and that conferences like Agile2011 don’t even exist anymore.

The fact is, none of them imagined when they gathered 10 years ago, that what they were doing at that exact moment would have such a major impact. But it did. And according to them, the task is now ours, people who practice Agile and attend such a conference to take over and bring our new ideas into motion.