Testing the agile piano!

It all started when I asked a good friend of mine what her favourite music would be for me to play on the piano. And she came up with “I Giorni’, written and performed by ‘Ludovico Einaudi’. She really wanted me to play it, so I put it on the top of my list, well on my backlog I guess. I thought it was so beautiful, I immediately printed the music and for the first time in years I really studied music from paper again. And as I was practicing hard, it hit me.

There are a lot of similarities between the studying I did and some aspects of agile and testing. For instance, I do not study the whole piece at once, but first a small part (iterations? Break it down into small workable items?). And when I start a new part, I need to keep practicing the first parts as well (regression testing?). And in the end all parts must come together (integration testing, here we go!).

Of course there are also some points where playing the piano and agile and testing have a mismatch, you’ll see. In this presentation I will show how I study a piece of music. I will point out that Agile is not just some trend or trick. It exists because the mind set really works and around us in our daily lives we practice it a lot more than we might think.

I will show you that some aspects of testing and agile can actually be used in real life. And I hope, after attending the presentation, you might look a little bit further then you’re used to and see the possibilities of Agile and testing where you have never seen them before… At the end I will play a little to let you hear the end result. It will hopefully be the climax of a funny and entertaining session!