On October 29th the VI Agile Saturday took place at Swedbank’s IT-building. With the maximum number of 250 tickets “sold” it was the largest Agile Saturday to date.

One of the main attractions this time was definitely the lecture by Gojko Adzic about challenging requirements. Gojko is a highly-renowned and experienced agile coach who quickly won the hearts of the audience with his energetic performance and received a load of positive feedback. In addition to him we had a number of Finnish and Estonian presenters with different topics and workshops, including Henri Kivioja from Ericsson Finland, Kitty Mamers from Skype and Hannes Lents from Garage48.

This time we really made an effort to get some feedback from participants both about the lectures and the whole event altogether, which gave us a pretty good overview of the positive and negative aspects people noticed.

The most mentioned problem in the feedback, as many of you might have already guessed, was the lack of cool air. It’s unfortunate that the ventilation system failed, but on the other hand – it is nice that the main problem of such a large-scale event is the ventilation and not the topics, presenters or overall organisation.

Photos of the event can be seen on Agile Estonia’s Facebook page, videos of lectures will be uploaded soon. The next Agile Saturday is planned for the beginning of next year with one keynote speaker already confirmed. In case you have any ideas or propositions concerning the next Agile Saturday, be sure to let us know.

Thanks and see you next year!

For the period of 28.-30.10.2011 Sokos Hotel Viru has offered the participants of Agile Saturday the following special room rates: Standard SGL 57 EUR / DBL 67 EUR. In case you wish to stay there with the offered price, give the administrator the password, which is (surprise-surprise): Agile Saturday.

Hotel Viru is situated at the very heart of Tallinn and during the Soviet era it used to be a kind of a gate to the western world. It was the first really modern hotel in Tallinn, where all the important guests and celebrities stayed. Also it is well known that many of the rooms were under constant attention of the “investigatory organs”. For more information and historical facts you can visit the KGB museum at the hotel.

Here is the link to the hotel’s webpage: http://www.sokoshotels.fi/en/hotels/tallinn/. Sokos Hotel Viru, Viru väljak 4, 10111 Tallinn, Estonia. Ph. +372 6 809 308.

See you in Tallinn!

Markus Hjort and Tiina Kiuru from Reaktor Innovations will be making an appearance at Agile Saturday on October 29th:

Markus Hjort, Reaktor Innovations

Effective testing is an integrated part of agile development. It’s essential for a successful team to be able to combine different agile testing practices to generate a cycle of feedback and constant improvement. Finding the right balance between the amount of information gained by testing, the effort/cost of testing and the feedback time is crucial. It becomes easier when testing is a cross-functional activity engaging all team members.

Tiina Kiuru, Reaktor Innovations

In this presentation we will walk through the different testing activities required in order to develop and complete a feature from specification to Done. The presentation focuses on higher level testing activities that typically can be performed by all team members. The goal is to provide an easy and practical approach to understanding the idea, potential and even some of the pitfalls of the presented agile testing practices.