After CITCON Denver, members of the Denver testing community decided to put together their own local testing open spaces conference. Congratulations are in order for Ben Simo and Heidi Harmes-Campbell who did a fantastic job getting the conference off the ground.

Agile methodologies were a big topic both in sessions and in the hallways throughout the conference. I was struck by a consistency between horror stories of switching to agile and the success stories. When the developers and testers worked closely together, Agile methodologies tended to work pretty while. When the developers and testers were kept far apart - or were outright antagonistic towards each other, experiments with Agile tended to fail. Short iterations simply don't leave enough time for poor communication or petty squabbling. Developers and testers need to work closely together (often literally) to be successful and keep everyone able to contribute well through the whole iteration.

Automated functional testing was a popular topic as well and the session on maintainable automated tests was excellent. Ruby seems to be increasingly the language of choice for building open source based test harnesses with Waitr getting a good deal of attention at the conference. Most teams still seem to have limited amount of automation but even the teams not doing much automated testing seem to be looking into it. Automated tests are ideal for basic regression testing and should free the time of manual testers who were doing that regression work to find bugs hidden deeper in the applications.

I did see limited awareness and interest in continuous integration and life cycle automation from most of the testers.  As automated testing starts playing a bigger and bigger role, integrating those tests into the rest of the build and release process will be a more obvious activity. In the meantime, those of us in the CI community need to do a better job reaching out to testers rather than just developers and release managers.

It was great to see another open spaces meeting in action and interact with Denver's testing community. - Eric Minick