Agile Development East Test a Thon

Friday, December 6, 2013

 

A couple weeks ago, I was at Boston for Agile Development East, along with Microsoft people for a Visual Studio 2013 Launch Event. While there, we hosted another volunteer hackathon for the Humanitarian Toolbox.

I continue to be happy with the response we're getting.  Agile Development East is a testing and project management conference, although it's growing a more developer centered audience.  We had a great response from all those communities. Some project managers approached us about running projects for us. We had testers spend some time on the apps doing exploratory testing.  Our release is getting closer.  They found a few, but far fewer than at the earlier StarWest event.

We had a number of new developers approach us and talk to us about contributing. That's helping us get these first applications ready for use by humanitarian organizations. 

We also had a few community leaders from the Boston community approach us about running projects.  We've got enough of a backlog to do that. We've also learned enough that we're getting close to scaling Humanitarian Toolbox out to local community groups worldwide.  We've learned quite a bit about keeping ongoing development happening after our in person events. To be fair, we've made some mistakes, but we have learned from them.  We're getting more organized, and we're growing the skills to run these distributed projects that are moved forward in volunteer efforts.

I also recorded a new .NET Rocks show, talking about Humanitarian Toolbox, and the new support for Typescript in Visual Studio 2013.