You have to love spring time in Alberta.  The tulips have such a contrast against the snow at 21:30 on a Saturday evening:

Date: November 4th
Time: 5:30pm doors open, 6:00pm event starts
Location: Edmonton Room in the Stanley Milner Library
Event Title: Practical Automated Testing Dojo

As we may have eluded to in recent newsletters, we’re going to try some new style events for this year’s schedule.  In the past the lecture presentations that we’ve held have provided great content in an easily accessible format.  They also seem to have left attendees wanting for more practical and hands on exposure to the technology being discussed.  This event will be the first of those new formats that will allow you to get started with that practical experience while still receiving some guidance.

How the Dojo event will work:

At the start of the meeting (6pm in this case) we will provide a brief introduction talk on Automated Testing.  This will take up no more than 15-30 minutes and is not intended to be an in depth review of the practices involved.

After the introduction a number of volunteers who are well versed in Automated Testing will form breakout teams which attendees will be free to choose from.  Those teams will spend the majority of the remaining event time (1.5hrs plus) working through real world examples of how to write automated tests using different tools and different styles.  While there will be one person who can provide guidance, we are encouraging all attendees to spend time pair programming, watching and engaging in questions with the entire group.  Attendees should also feel free to move from one team to another as the content, styles and experiences may be different.

What, you ask, will the attendee be responsible for?  Well, our hope is that you will feel inclined to bring questions about Automated Testing and a desire to interact and learn with and from the rest of the community.  If you can, please bring your own laptop.  There will be some laptops available but they will be used in pair (or more) programming scenarios only. We will be providing a sample code base that needs many different kinds of tests added to it.  If you want the code at the time of the event, please bring a USB drive.  For those that don’t we will provide the code for download from the Edmug website after the event.

As this is our first event of this style, we are going to treat it as a learning experience and apply those lessons to the coming events.  As always, we encourage you to provide us with any feedback that you can at info@edmug.net

The Edmug Team

www.edmug.www

So, with that out of the way, it’s a pretty loosy-goosy format.  If you are going, is there anything in particular that you would like to see or do?  Some code you would like help with?  Need a laptop?  I will be there, and more than willing to help out with your questions and figured that it can’t hurt to find out in advance some specifics.  Feel free to respond to me either via comments here, or by e-mail (tom at opgenorth dot net).