On october 18th, GRILOG (Grenoble Isère Logiciel) organized a mini-conference about software testing. There were six lightning talks performed by different Grenoble area software actors.

Agility was not mentioned in the topic of the night, nevertheless, most of the presenters agreed on numerous notions that are central to Agile Testing :
– quality/tests are not handled at the end at the project (Eric Pierrel, Itris Automation)
– to have feedbacks very early in the project (Anne Pellegrin, Multicom). She explained the Wizard of Oz experiment ! Very interesting. Made me think about Pretotyping by Alberto Savoia.
– tests are driving the projects (Remy Dujardin, Hardis) and the whole project team should be involved in it.

So it is interesting to see how Agile was over-represented once we started to talk about quality in software. Agile is still a big topic in the area. A recent prove is the craze to get the tickets for Agile Grenoble 2012 conference. It sold out 2 weeks before the events. 500 tickets for a city like Grenoble is quite an indicator.

Slides and video of the presentations (all in french) are available online.

After the  presentation, I had the chance to chat a bit with a local university teacher in software engineering. He was a bit skeptical about this “whole Agile thing” and was happy to outsource this part of the program to an external presenter… a guy from a local IT department. So, academic and business do talk together sometimes….(“please, help me present Agile !”)