a little madness

Well, CITCON Asia/Pacific 2007 is done. On the whole, the event was a great success. There was a great turnout, lots of interesting discussion, and all the organisation went smoothly. Thanks goes to both organisers, Jeffrey Fredrick and Paul Julius, for pulling it off.

Looking back on the conference, both Daniel and myself gained a lot:

• A first experience of an OpenSpace conference. Going in, I liked the theory of OpenSpace a lot, and in practice I have to say that despite some challenges it is a great format. Sessions are a lot more interactive, and you can get more out of a session by putting more in yourself. Of course, not all sessions work out as you may have hoped. From my observation, smaller sessions on more focused topics are more likely to succeed. A larger session on a more general topic needs an experienced facilitator. The one topic I proposed was more of an all-in discussion, so I didn’t really feel the need to do much “facilitation”.
• Of course, we got plenty out of the sessions themselves. My personal favourite was a small session about continuous integration with distributed SCMs. This is an interest of mine that I hope to follow up soon. We also got great insights into the problems that our customers (and potential customers ? ) face. Daniel made the observation that people reported many problems just managing their builds over time, even before getting to automated testing and continuous integration. This is an area that is of obvious importance to us as you need a good build to apply Pulse most effectively.
• We got to meet a bunch of people from various software backgrounds all interested in continuous integration. It was great to see such a turn out and enthusiasm for this area, and really reinforces that this is a boom time for improving software build and test practices. As noted by many attendees, having food put on right at the venue really helped keep discussions going. The times between sessions were just as valuable as the sessions themselves.
• We got to meet some more of our competitors, to whom we can naturally relate. There is a great spirit between the competitors I have met in our field. It’s great to be able to have a chat about the common problems we all face, and the opportunities in the future.
• Beer. And curry. ‘Nuff said.

And all this was free. If only there were more conferences organised in this spirit.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 1:56 am and is filed under Agile, Continuous Integration, Technology, Testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.