me.andering – Willem van den Ende

The Agile Open 2007 Europe Book of Proceedings is out now!

Monday planning session

It contains photos as well as results of individual sessions. We asked the session conveners to provide (handwritten) notes of each session. Raphael Pierquin scanned the session notes, and combined them with photos of flipcharts and people in the session to PDF documents.

Diana, Stephan, Bernard Zero and Rachel have Fun with Agile 

We ran this as an expiriment to see if we could have an in-between form from open space by-the-book (handwritten proceedings copied to paper – is timely, but costs lots of paper and is not searchable ) and a wiki (does not need paper, is searchable, but participants often leave writing down the results for ‘later’ ).

The book of proceedings is not yet complete, published in the ‘release early, release often’ spirit. The PDF’s are attached to an an individual results page for the session – we hope participants will transcribe some of the  results, so we have both timely as well as searchable results.

 Jan, Nynke, Robert and Erik enjoy the scenery

At Agile Open, I have heard rumours that there is going to be a Guerilla Open Space @ XP 2007. Today I have heard a rumour that the Agile Alliance is going to sponsor it.

I heard good stories on the Open Space being run last year at XP 2006 in Finland – Many attendees, extra rooms needed etc…

This year, the conference organisers decided not to have an Open Space. Charlie Poole, who facilitated it last year, offered to organise it again this year. He heard nothing from the organisers for a long time. At the last moment they said they are not going to have an Open Space. Does the word ‘stonewalling’ sound familiar?

Question: Why would a conference organisation not support a part of the conference that was highly succesful last year??

So, if you are in Como for XP 2007 or otherwise (for the guerilla open space you probably will not have to register), I recommend you check out whether this Guerrilla Open Space rumour is actually true. Quality is guarenteed by the passion of the people who choose to be there .

(Answer: the ‘acadamic paper’ programme at xp200* is weak and people spontaneously apply ‘the law of two feet’ – they go if they can learn or contribute more somewhere else).

I’ve been looking (and still am, but less) for a simple solution to test-drive website development with browser integration. Rob Westgeest pointed me to Firewatir. Firewatir is a Ruby wrapper around Firefox through the JSSH shell extension.

Firewatir is new and still under development, but looks promising to me, as it fullfills the four R’s: Easy to Read, (w)Rite, Run and Refactor. The only thing that is required is a firefox plugin for JSSH and a ruby library (installable through rubygems). Current downsides are scant documentation and the test process seems to hang sometimes. We also had to make some extensions to start Firefox automatically under linux (Firewatir was originally made for windows). The scant documentation you can get around if you read the tests.

We had a session on browser testing at Agile Open Europe this week. Apparently, links to Firewatir and its (scant) documentation are not that easy to find from some countries.

• Introduction to FireWatir
• Posts on FireWatir in Angrez’s blog (the developer)
• Download page for FireWatir, manual and JSSH extension

Hope this helps to make them easier to find. I’d be curious to know what you are going to use it for