Recently I co-presented with Alex Ruiz on Agile User Interface Development at the Agile 2006 conference. Alex presented on Abbot and I gave a demo on Selenium.

The objective of my talk was to show:

1. How to write acceptance tests for Web UIs? The focus was on driving UI development from a functional stand-point using acceptance tests.
2. How to quickly build regression/functional tests for an application with existing UI [legacy code] using Selenium?
3. Last but not the least, to introduce Selenium

For the demo, I used VQWiki as my test application. The wiki is a simple yet powerful application to demonstrate some of the core selenium and acceptance testing fundas. Coz of this, the Wiki turned out to be an interesting application for the demo. I had tests in Selenium core and Selenium remote control. This was sufficient to show the power of Selenium. Finally when I recorded a test scenario using Selenium IDE, the audience went gaga over Selenium.

I‘m hoping to upload the tutorial soon. Till then you can have a look at the presentation here.

Recently I presented an experience report at the Agile 2006 conference on offshore maintenance projects using Agile. Following are the details:

Abstract:
Maintaining a business critical application in production having serious performance and scalability issues can be quite a challenging task in itself. Having a new development team sitting on the other side of the globe can easily complicate things further. This experience report describes the challenges faced in this environment, lessons learned, and how we won the client‘s trust and delivered business value as quickly and consistently as possible.

The existing literature states the following as challenges with distributed/offshore team:

1. Decrease in communication bandwidth
2. Lack of visibility into project status
3. Configuration management
4. Command and Control structure
5. Cultural difference
6. Time difference

The points listed above seem like byproducts of something more important. This paper will present the following root causes and how we handled them:

1. Lack of trust
2. Loss of context, both business and technical
3. Delay in feedback cycle due to increase in distance and time difference
4. Duplication of efforts
5. Change is inevitable

You can download the Offshore Agile Maintenance Presentation from here.