A quick update on the Bay Area TD-DT Summit I mentioned in a previous post.

The response has been overwhelming. So overwhelming that I discovered today that I hadn’t responded to everyone that sent a request for invitation. I think I’m caught up now though. So if you sent a request for invitation already, and haven’t heard a peep from either me or Chris McMahon, please send it again. I’ll do the appropriate grovelling for having misplaced your request, and we’ll see if we can make room.

Speaking of making room, I should mention that at this point, I think we’re full.

Actually, we passed “full” a while ago. Our sponsor who is generously donating space outdid themselves by allowing us to expand the gathering. But there comes a point where we have to say, “this is big enough,” and “there will be other gatherings.”

So if you haven’t contacted us yet about the TD/DT summit, but meant to, don’t despair. This will be the first of many, I suspect. There’s a vibrant community of incredibly cool folks interested in how testers who code and developers who test can learn from each other and improve their craft. And I think we’re all just beginning to find each other.

Jason Huggins has very kindly pointed me to two more places where Developer-Testers/Tester-Developers (DT/TD) hang out. Interestingly, both were in London.

• Google hosted LTAC (the London Test Automation Conference) in September 2006. Antony Marcano mentioned LTAC on his blog. And the LTAC talks are available on Google Videos. And there’s a mail list.
• ThoughtWorks sponsored CITCON (the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference), in Chicago and also in London. I had trouble finding online content relating to the conference. The citconf.com site points back to the thoughtworks.com main site, and most of the blog entries I found said, “looks like it will be fun, I’m going/I might go/you should go.” But no one I found said, “I went, it was great, and here’s what happened…” I found pictures though. And there’s a mail list.

(What makes London the hotbed of DT/TD activity? Hmmm.)

Anyway…

Chris McMahon and I have been talking about pulling together a small peer conference in the SF Bay Area. And the more we talked, the more excited we got about it. So today we said: “let’s just do it and see what happens.” And we set a date. So…without further ado…I’m pleased to announce…

Bay Area Developer-Tester/Tester-Developer (DT/TD) Summit
Saturday, February 24
A peer-driven gathering of developer-testers and tester-developers to share knowledge and code.

Location: SF Bay Area, exact location TBD. If you have space you’re willing (and authorized) to lend us, we’d like to talk to you.

This is a small, peer-driven, non-commercial, invitation-only conference in the tradition of LAWST, AWTA, and the like. The content comes from the participants, and we expect all participants to take an active role. We’re seeking participants who are testers who code, or developers who test.

Our emphasis will be on good coding practices for testing, and good testing practices for automation. That might include topics like: test code and patterns; refactoring test code; creating abstract layers; programmatically analyzing/verifying large amounts of data; achieving repeatability with random tests; OO model-based tests; and/or automatically generating large amounts of test data.

These are just possible topics we might explore. The actual topics will depend on who comes and what experience reports/code they’re willing to share.

If we can get donated space, the cost to participate will be $0. If we can’t get donated space the cost will be a nominal fee (~$50) intended to help us defray expenses.

Participants will be responsible for their own travel expenses.

Proposed Agenda:

• Timeboxed group discussions: “Essential attributes of a tester-developer and developer-tester (differences and similarities)” and “What tester-developers want to learn from developers; what developer-testers want to learn from testers.”
• Code Examples/Experience Reports (we figure we have time for 3 of these)
• End of day discussion: Raising visibility for the role of a DT/TD, building community among practitioners

If you’re interested in participating, send me an email answering these questions:

• Which are you: a tester who codes or a developer who tests?
• How did you come to have that role?
• What languages do you usually program tests in?
• What do you hope to contribute to the Bay Area DT/TD summit? Do you have any code or examples that you’d like to share? (Please note that you should not share anything covered by a non-disclosure agreement.)
• What do you hope to get out of the Bay Area DT/TD summit?

My own goals with doing this are:

• Learn from others better ways of programming automated tests
• Meet others in the DT/TD role
• Build community

I spent this last weekend at AWTA, the Austin Workshop on Test Automation. Our official topic was Open Source Testing Frameworks. Before the meeting, I figured we’d discuss experience reports about how folks used Watir/Selenium/xUnit/CruiseControl/etc. and Ruby/Perl/Python/etc. to cobble together totally automated, lights out, acceptance testing solutions.

We did discuss topics like that. Bob Cotton showed us some very cool code integrating SeleniumRC and rspec. Jeff Fry showed some excellent Ruby code that generated tests on the fly. Some folks got together and spiked an integration of Selenium and Watir. (Brian Marick dubbed it “Mineral Watir.” Oooh. Bubbly.) Paul Rogers and David Crosby both spent time pairing with me to improve my Web 2.0 testing example, digging into JSUnit, Selenium, and the unittest.js library from Prototype. (Yes, I’ll get around to posting code sometime soon.)

And we did talk about how any given Open Source test automation approach intevitably involves integrating multiple pieces.

But what I didn’t expect to happen is that the discussion would turn to how developers are becoming testers and testers are becoming developers. In retrospect, I should have known it would happen. The subject is bound to come up when a bunch of developers who are passionate about testing hang out with a bunch of testers who spend a lot of their time writing code.

And it seems we weren’t the only ones thinking about this topic. Chris McMahon kindly alerted me to Steve Rowe’s excellent post about Test Developers.

So this has me thinking.

Tester-developers and developer-testers aren’t new. But we seem to be a hidden sub-community. We sometimes have titles like “Tool Smith,” but more often we have titles that look like most other tester or developer titles: “Senior Test Engineer” or somesuch.

But the role is growing.

I think that’s partly because large, successful companies are leading the way. Microsoft has a special job class and title: “Software Development Engineer in Test.” And I have heard unsubstantiated rumors that interviewing for a test position with Google involves answering questions about algorithm design.

I also think Agile is contributing to the growth in the role. Agile teams tend to blur the distinction between jobs, particularly developers and testers. Agile developers are test infected, and Agile testers tend to spend time mucking about in code. As Agile grows, so the hyphenated tester-developer/developer-tester role grows.

So, if the number of people doing both test and development growing, where are we gathering as a community?

One gathering place is online communities.  The agile-testing mail list is chock full of folks who both test and develop.

Another natural place for a community to gather is at a conference.  AWTA was a gathering place on a small scale. But when I look at the major conferences, they’re pitched to Developers (SDWest), Testers (STAR), or Everyone (Agile, Better Software).

I want more opportunities to share experiences, write code together, and learn from each other.

So, if you’re a tester-developer/developer-tester, where do you go to share test code, talk about test refactoring strategies, or exchange notes on test frameworks and scripting languages?
Oh, and if you have a blog related to ( testing && development ), please post a link in the comments!