Introduction
A lot of reviews of the community day have already been posted so instead of repeating things I want to look forward and reflect about what influence the event might have on the future.
BOF Sessions
Nigel James - SAP meets Wordpress - taking a look at how SAP might integrate with the popular blogging / CMS software
Nigel did a fun session about installing wordpress in a SAP environment. I learned quite a lot about using PHP in an enterprise environment. For example I was not aware that you can run PHP inside a java container. Interesting stuff and maybe we will have something working in the near future. So Nigel where is the blog in which you kick-off the project?
Thomas Jung - How to keep your development team's technical skills up to date
Fun session in which Thomas described how they ran the development team in his former company. Really good discussion and I took the term "champion" with me. Who is a champion? These persons are basically the alpha geeks in your team. The developers who you want to support as a manager since they are most likely the people with the highest skill level and therefore serve as great mentors. Maybe Thomas can come up with a blog post about this topic in the future. Definitely a very interesting and important topic.Tobias Trapp - Integration Tests in ABAP Development: Testtools and Testtool Design
Due to the amount of manual testing he was facing, Tobias came up with a very interesting approach for testing the document workflow at his company. Just imagine having the possibility of automatically loading data inside a printer spool and then running unit tests against it, very cool! While his solution does a whole lot more, for me the most interesting aspect is the fact that the tests itself can be written in a excel file. This enables testers or even the bpx group to develop new tests without developer interaction. His spreadsheet idea inspired me to look more into an area which I would call user driven integration tests. The idea behind this is to define processes or business rules in a spreadsheet or a domain specific language. The data is then transformed into actual tests which can be run against the business rules layer of an application. One example for such a framework is FIT. In theory this enables the bpx guys to run their requirements directly against the actual implementation. Maybe it would be possible to build something in this area on top of eCatt...Me - Exploratory testing or ways to improve your manual testing skills...
As I posted BOF Session in Munich: Exploratory testing or ways to improve your manual testing skills... the idea behind this session was to help people who are doing manual testing but never attended a testing course. As in Melbourne I asked the participants how many of them had a testing course. Sadly. the results were even worse than in Melbourne. Out of approximately 10 people only one attended a testing course. From my perspective the session went well. We had a good discussion and hopefully I motivated some participants to look into improving their testing skills on their own. For that reason I published a list with blogs, articles, videos about testing on my personal website. The list can be found here and it also includes my slides. Thanks again to all the people who attended my session.Other highlights
SDN on your mobile
Some months ago I published a website which allows you to browse SDN on the mobile device of your choice. However since I do not own a device which can render html I could never see it in the "wild". During the community day quite a lot of people showed me how it looked like on their devices. Surprisingly, it was usable on all the devices I saw. I could even test it on an iPhone (thanks Ed Herrmann) which made my day. Thanks Darius for holding it!
So if you have not heard about the website before check it out: http://tknight.org/sdn. I blogged about it SDN on your iPhone? and Search for Blogs on your iPhone, Blackberry,....
People
Obviously one of the main reason for attending the event was to catch up with members of the community. I met everybody I wanted to meet. Highlights were gregor.wolf3/blog (If you need a guide for Munich make sure you pick Gregor), daniel.mcweeney/blog, ed.herrmann/blog, Tobias Trapp, The specified item was not found., marilyn.pratt/blog and the RedMonk guys.
More pictures can be found here.
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