One of the problems of presenting a double session at Agile 2009 is that miss out on a bunch of the great talks that are going on at the conference at the same time. Added to that, the (very) last minute preparations that I was doing with Paul King meant that I only got to sit in on one session (apart from our own).

Automated Deployment with Maven & Friends – Going The Whole Nine Yards

This was a good overview by John Smart of using Maven as a build tool as well as how you might use tools such as Cargo and Liquibase and scripting languages like Groovy to automate your deployment process. I was hoping John would have the silver bullet to linking the Jira release button to a deployment script, however it appears the only way of doing this still is via a plugin for Bamboo.

How To Make Your Testing More Groovy

The session I presented with Paul King, we got a reasonable turnout for a technical double session and the session feedback forms were overwhelmingly positive. The slides are available in a separate post.

Dinner with Manning & John Hancock

I had the pleasure of having dinner with Todd Green from Manning, Greg Smith (co-author of Becoming Agile) and Paul King (co-author of Groovy In Action). As the technical proof-reader for Becoming Agile and knowing Paul King, I also got an invite for traditional deep-dish Chicago pizza.

Afterwards, Paul and I treked up the “Magnificent Mile” and up 95 floors to the Signature Room in the John Hancock Center (Chicago’s fourth tallest building but best observation deck according to the locals). The views were amazing (the pictures don’t do justice to the city lights that carry on into the distance!)