CAMUG February Meeting

CAMUG Members!

Now that the cold is starting to let up, its time for CAMUG again. The February meeting will be Tuesday, February 5th at the University of Calgary. For this month I'm pleased to have a panel of guests speaking on the topic of Acceptance Test Driven Development. Come listen and participate, this is a great chance to understand how to implement acceptance test driven design at your company, or to clear up the differences between acceptance test driven design, unit testing, and general TDD.

The panelists are: Adam Geras, Frank Mauer and Janet Gregory.

Adam Geras has been in the IT industry for 19 years as a developer, architect, researcher, tester, and test manager. His research at the University of Calgary centred on test-driven development from both the developer and customer perspectives. Most recently Adam has been keen on using dynamic languages for scripted and unscripted testing and is the author of PSExpect, an open source testing framework based on Powershell, Microsoft .NET-based scripting language for system administrators (and testers!). His job at Ideaca as chief methodologist is to promote project health awareness and project wellness, with a testing slant.

Dr. Frank Maurer is a professor at the University of Calgary and the head of the Agile Software Engineering/e-Business Engineering (ase/ebe) group at the University of Calgary. His research interests are:

* agile software methodologies
* engineering digital table applications
* executable acceptance test driven development
* integrating agile methods and interaction design
* tools for agile teams, specifically for globally distributed software development
* web engineering
* experience and knowledge management

Janet Gregory is a Calgary-based consultant specializing building quality systems and her passion is promoting agile quality processes. She has helped to introduce development agile practices into companies as tester or coach, and has successfully transitioned traditional test teams into the agile world. Her focus is working the business users and testers to understand their role in agile projects. She is currently writing a book on agile testing with Lisa Crispin due out in 2009.

Date: Tuesday, February 5th.
Time: 6-6:30 Juice & Snacks. 6:30-7:30 Panel Discussion.
Where: University of Calgary, ICT 122

Acceptance Test Driven Development is a popular and controversial topic in the agile community. Experts on our panel will be able to give an overview of the philosophy and implementation of this practice, and for once you'll have time to pick their brains and ask any number of varied or specific questions. We'll have the usual juice, coffee, sweets and snacks, as well as a good chance to network and meet people in the local community. I'll be sure to bring a few leading questions to help things along :)

See you there!