Last week I attended to Agile Dev Practices, a brand-new conference done in Postdam, organized by Diaz Hilterscheid, the people behind the renowned Agile Testing Days. It was my third international conference (the first outside Spain) and the first one I have gone as a speaker.

I had the good fortune to assist to Carlos Blé tutorial about “Practical BDD for RIAs with JavaScript”. It was a great tutorial, more suitable to do in two days (or at least, one and a half) but equally great. I got useful insights and a lot of stuff to study.

That Monday at night, all the speakers went to the speakers dinner. I shared table with an amazing group of people like Jan Ehrhardt, Daniel Maslyn, Marko Taipale and Gáspár Nagy. A very funny and instructive dinner.

The conference itself went well. Maybe a little bit less people than expected, probably because of the coincidence with QCon conference and because of it was the first edition of the conference.

Some of the talks and the keynotes were really great, but the best, as always, was the possibility of knowing great professionals with tons of experience and be able to talk with them.

My session was on Wednesday. It consisted in three exercises to study the people’s behavior in a retrospective, ending with some advises to try to create a good environment in a retrospective. Here you have the extended version of the slides.

I encourage all of you to go to as many conferences outside your country you can. I know it could be a big expense, but sometimes a flight to a foreign country is cheaper than an internal one, and the hotels all expensive everywhere. But you will open your mind, meet great professionals and learn lots of things.

For my part, I take as homework to study Behavior Driven Development and Specflow in depth.