During last week, Shaggy, MartinS and I, went to Brazil to attend this conference organized by the Latin-American Conference on Agile Development Methodologies. The three of us were speakers. Ariel presentation was “Agile PMO” (you can find more information in his post after the conference). MartinS talk about “High maturity agile practice”, a very interesting topic for those with experience in agile methods.

I was on charge of a workshop about planning and estimation and I am very pleased with the results, I wrote some more details about this workshop on my Spanish blog.

The keynote speakers were Brain Marick (signer of the agile manifesto), Daina Larsen (president of the Agile Alliance) and Roy Singham (founder and CEO of Thoughtworks). Other important speaker where Joshua Kerievsky (author of Refactoring to Patterns).

The conference were excellent and I could enjoyed it much more than the previous year.

At the end of the conference while of conference committee was doing the retrospective with Diana some friends and I have a talk with Brian Marick. I asked him what were in his opinion the skills a tester should meet to work in an agile team. He answered that there are 3 required skills:

1. Be able to understand the business.
2. Be able to automate tests, what in most cases requires some programming skills.
3. Have a good capacity of doing exploratory testing. In some point this ability could be even more important the 2.

Finally the committee announced that the candidate city for the next conference (agiles 2010) is Lima, Peru.

Here we are (from left to rigth): me, Shaggy and MartinS.

Shaggy recorded our session, so as soon as they be available I will add a reference to them.