The topics for this meeting are:

• node.js - evented I/O for JavaScript on the server
• Google Closure Tools - everything you need to build a Google-class web app
• Testing asynchronous code with Screw.Unit and Blue Ridge

Bring a laptop if you have one. This will be an activity night.

There will be pizza, kindly provided by Jive Software. Plus we will have essentials on hand for celebrating the JavaScript Admirers' first birthday.

Feel free to join our mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/pdxjs if you too are a JavaScript admirer. Or visit our web site for more information at http://pdxjs.com/.

Announcing Agile Open Northwest 2010! This Agile Open Space event will be held February 9th and 10th, 2010, in the Seattle Center Northwest Rooms. Please see http://www.agileopennorthwest.org for registration information and further details.

We invite you to our fourth annual Agile Open Northwest conference. Alternating each year between Portland and Seattle, AONW conferences bring together practicing members of the Northwest Agile communities to explore the latest developments in agile software development. We held our third annual event last year in Portland and enjoyed another great success. Registration is $125.00 for both days, including light breakfast and lunch. This low-cost regional conference is a great opportunity to connect with the local agile community, experts and novices alike.

Please join us this year as we host 125 experienced, collaborative, committed agile practitioners from the Northwest U.S. (and beyond) in tackling the issues around our recurring theme "Agile for Real." As in past years, attendance is limited to a predetermined number in order retain the many advantages a small conference has to offer.

Here is a comment from a previous attendee:

"These two-day Agile Open Northwest conferences are an extremely good value. ..[Y]ou learn directly from practitioners in the agile community what works and what doesn't. I attended the first two of these conferences, they were stunningly good... loads of practical, useful stuff and stimulating discussions." -- Ian Savage, PNSQC Program Chair

More information can be found at http://www.agileopennorthwest.org. Registration is open now. We look forward to seeing you there.

Conversation and peer mentoring starting at 6, presentations at 7. For more information, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter or join the #testrubypdx Slack channel (under PDX.rb).

Presentations

Bernerd Schaefer: Refactor Your Feature Specs!

expect(page).to have_css(".active"). It's clear what this line does, but what is it really testing? And why? Together we'll take some real-life feature specs and refactor them so the intent of the spec shines through.

Behavior Driven Development with the Spock Specification Framework

A brief introduction to Behavior Driven Development (BDD) and use of the Spock Specification Framework to achieve BDD. This presentation will provide a solid starting point for building BDD specifications in Spock and provide direction in which expand your knowledge of BDD as you delve into the Spock eco system.

• Overview of what BDD is and how it differs from Automated Testing
• Building a Specification with Spock from the ground up to achieve BDD
• Using Spock’s built in Mocking framework to mock data and test interactions
• Data Driven Testing using Spock’s Data Tables and Data Pipes
• Brief Introduction to Properties Based Testing and use of Spock Genesis for data generation
• How to utilize Specifications as Documentation
• Other odds and ends of the Spock Framework

Speaker

Jamie L. Smyth

Through the course of nearly 20 years in professional software development, Jamie has promoted many rising paradigms that are in common practice today, including the use of Asynchronous Communication, Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State, Test Driven Development, and many others. Currently Jamie is brining Continuous Delivery and Deployment Automation to BodyBuilding.com and Behavior Driven Development and Automated Testing are key components of this strategy. Jamie lives by the mantra that software should be a pleasure to use and create.

Portland's testing user group for Ruby developers! Conversation and peer mentoring starting at 6, presentations at 7. For more information, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter or join the #testrubypdx Slack channel (under the pdxruby team).

How and Why to Test Rake Tasks - Brett Chalupa

Testing classes and modules is essential to writing well tested Ruby code. However, testing Rake tasks is not as straight-forward. In this talk, you will learn how and why it is valuable to test Rake tasks. This talk will go over testing regular ole Rake tasks and Rake tasks in a Rails app. Before you know it, you will be writing Rake tasks in a test-driven manner, hooray!

Portland's testing user group for Ruby developers! Conversation and peer mentoring starting at 6, presentations at 7. For more information, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter or join the #testrubypdx Slack channel (under the pdxruby team).

Paul Baker - Golden Thorns: Lessons from the Gilded Rose Kata

The Gilded Rose Kata is a fairly well known kata that utilizes a "golden master testing" strategy to provide safety while the developer refactors a messy legacy code base in order to add new features. I will walk through my take on the kata and then review some lessons that I have learned as a sr. developer working with legacy code and where this pattern can be helpful.

Portland's testing user group for Ruby developers! Conversation and peer mentoring starting at 6, presentations at 7. For more information, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter or join the #TestRubyPDX Slack channel (under the pdxruby team). We are still looking for speakers, so if you're interested, visit testrubypdx.org/speak for details and suggested topics!

Portland's testing user group for Ruby developers! Conversation and peer mentoring starting at 6, presentations at 7. For more information, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter or join the #testrubypdx Slack channel (under the pdxruby team). We are still looking for speakers, so if you're interested, visit testrubypdx.org/speak for details and suggested topics!

Agilists from across the Pacific Northwest will converge at the Nike World Headquarters for a career changing day. This is a one-day conference with 3 keynote speakers (Richard Sheridan, best-selling author of Joy Inc., Gene Kim, founder and CTO of Tripwire, and Mamie Jones, SVP of Product Development at Intuit) as well as 20 workshops on Leadership, Product, Technical Enablement, Leadership, Innovation, Agility and much more.

Use this promo code, MeetAC17 for a 10% discount on registration if you register by 8/23/2017!

We've all seen or heard of "unit" test suites that all pass but the resulting project doesn't actually work. Behavior Driven Development (BDD) can provide a higher level of confidence in a project by testing at a higher level: the project's input and output level.

In this presentation we'll look at examples of BDD implemented in cucumber, show how it can catch errors other tests can't, how it can be used not only for improving confidence in deployments but verifying deployments as well. Specifically focused on backend web services, the concepts in the presentation can be applied to other domains as well.

If you're looking for a presentation with code, but not too much, this is for you!

Bio: Matthew Mayer is an agile enthusiast, a cloud-native software engineer but mostly wishes he had more time to ride his motorcycles.

For a long time, folks (Rob included) misinterpreted Behavior Driven Development (BDD) as “Test-Driven Development done right,” as Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) with better tools, or as an umbrella term embracing both TDD and ATDD. So, how is BDD really done, and where does TDD fit in, if at all? It turns out that the real problem may lie in trying to pin down rigorous definitions for these terms, and trying to determine when to do which style of testing. Rob coaches teams to be prepared to use the BDD cycle and the TDD cycle when appropriate, and to be willing to move fluidly between these two intertwined cycles on a daily basis. Rob has witnessed significantly improved levels of communication, alignment, quality, and enthusiasm on teams -- and just in mere days, when BDD is embraced as the central activity of the whole team.

You’ll help explore why, when, and how to use both TDD and BDD together to build the most valuable and maintainable software possible.

Rob Myers is principle instructor and coach at Agile for All. He has over 30 years of professional experience with software development teams, and has been training and coaching organizations in Agile engineering practices since 1998. His courses blend fun, practical hands-on labs, "Training From the Back of the Room” learning techniques, and relevant first-person stories from both successful and not-so-successful Agile implementations. His clients have included many start-ups as well as Fortune 100 multinationals. Rob is currently working on his first technical book, Essential Test-Driven Development.

In an effort to raise the effectiveness of Scrum, the Scrum Alliance created the Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) program (AKA Agile Engineering course.) A Certified Scrum Developer is someone who has demonstrated through a combination of formal training and a technical skills assessment that he or she has a working understanding of Scrum principles and has learned specialized Agile engineering skills.

This three-day class is aimed at helping software development professionals and teams be more effective when implementing Scrum and other Agile methodologies. You will learn how to create and maintain high quality systems through industry standard practices such as Test Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI) and common software design patterns. This class was specifically designed to deliver the core Agile Development Practices Learning Objectives of the CSD program and should prepare the participant to successfully pass the Scrum Alliance CSD Candidate Assessment.

This class focuses on automated testing, TDD (heavily covered in class), Continuous Integration, Design Concepts (Design Principles and Practices) and Extreme Programming (XP) practices. Class is hands-on, and you will participate in a project where you will build an actual feature using Agile practices and learn about the technical practices. You'll learn about how team members interact during sprints. Other topics covered include Technical Debt: Strategies & Techniques to help reduce technical debt.

In order to earn the CSD certification, the Scrum Alliance requires at least five days of formal training followed by a CSD assessment/evaluation. This class fulfills 21 of the required 35 hours and can be paired with the Certified ScrumMaster class to complete the requirement.