I'm very happy to be a guest speaker at QCon Beijing in April 2012.

I submitted the 2 abstracts below. We haven't agreed completely on the schedule, but it seems like one of them will be a half-day tutorial (Shallow Depth of Tests) and the other one a talk (Predictably and Irrationally Agile).

Shallow Depth of Tests - Scalable TDD/BDD

Test automation is prevalent in the software development community. Practices like TDD and BDD are widespread and applied almost unquestionably. However, several organisations have struggled in attempting to scale automated test suites, which very often become slow, brittle, non-deterministic, unreliable and difficult to maintain.
In this talk, I will discuss some common mistakes, Tautological TDD (TTDD), for example, and also present patterns that I have successfully applied, such as Shallow Depth of Tests and Testing Pyramid. These have enabled us to achieve maintainable and scalable tests that fulfill their purpose - to help software development teams deliver faster and more confidently the features required by business people.

Predictably and Irrationally Agile

People behavior is one of the centerpieces of Agile software development. Cognitive Psychology and Behavioral Economics have helped us achieve a better understanding of some human seemingly idiosyncratic behaviors, for example, the decoy effect on the decision-making process. Agile teams are constantly making decisions, for instance, while prioritising, estimating stories or choosing the size of an iteration.
This talk will compare and correlate Dan Ariely's controlled experiments described in his book "Predictably Irrational" to Agile. The anticipated result should be an increased awareness of the reasoning behind some Agile values, principles and practices which, as a consequence, should improve the way we apply them as agile adopters and practitioners.