XP Day Toronto 2007 is coming up soon, so I’m busy working on xpday.info, preparing it for the stampede of registrations we expect in the coming weeks. (I can dream.) In the process, I am writing Rails unit tests, which means using fixtures again. I wasn’t thrilled with my use of fixtures last time I coded Rails seriously, because it felt like the “One Dataset For All Tests” anti-pattern that I discovered so painfully on my first XP project. I would be much, much happier if I could have fixtures with the flexibility of named datasets per test, just as I can get with DbUnit. Still, I remembered
reading something about DRY database configurations and it gave me an idea for implementing a kind of ObjectMother pattern in YAML. This is what I did.

dummy: &dummy
  id: 10
  where: "Nowhere, man"
  web_site_url: http://default.xpday.info
  start_date: 2007-01-01
  registration_open_on: 2006-11-01

open:
  <<: *dummy
  id: 11
  registration_open_on: 2006-12-01

The dummy fixture object must provide values for all the required properties, but should not provide values for the optional ones. The idea is for the properties to be overridable so that later fixture objects can specify only those property they care about specifying, accepting defaults for the rest. It seems pretty similar to ObjectMother to me! We’ll see how it works for me.

XP Day Toronto 2007 was successful, even though attendance was down quite a bit from 2005. I am learning to be happy about a smaller event, as the more intimate setting is good for almost everyone participating. We have some changes to make to the format, but I can safely say that the experiment we call XP Day North America is mostly giving good results, so we intend to continue. Next stop, Manhattan on September 22, 2007, with details to come soon.

The XP/Agile Toronto user group hosted a session entitled “What we learned at XP Day Toronto 2007” soon after our event, featuring five talks from various people at Intelliware. It was certainly satisfying to see people excited about the event and happy with their attendance and involvement. Brian Marick certainly delivered a thought-provoking keynote and Open Space was a definite hit, thanks mainly to Deb Hartmann’s expert facilitation. One person, Jason Cheong-Kee-You, wrote about his reactions to the day at length on his weblog, which makes for good reading. If you’d like details, I’m sure he’d provide them.

Click on the title to listen to a podcast from Agile 2006, with Bob Payne as your host. I spoke mostly about XP Day North America, and the plan sounds dated now. We didn’t run the conference in Austin, in Portland, in St. Louis… but we still have plans to get there eventually. Manhattan is likely a “go” for autumn 2007, and we hope to pick up the pace in 2008. And yes, I am a columnist for IEEE Software, but no, I haven’t started writing that other book yet.

Saturday, September 23 is fast approaching. That’s the day of XP Day Montreal 2006, the third in our series of one-day conferences dedicated to Extreme Programming in North America. Although we’ve taken a year off, we’re back with top-notch speakers, including Laurent Bossavit and Michael Feathers. This, to our knowledge, is the first officially bilingual XP conference in North America, with content in both French and English. Please join us!

I am in lovely Oshawa, Ontario, stopped at the local Via Rail station, on my way to Ottawa by about 16:30 today. Tonight is the first stop the MacDonald-Cartier Freeway Experience, where I’ll be both facilitating a planning session and giving a talk on planning at Cognos, located at 3755 Riverside Drive. All are welcome. For details, click the title of this entry.