Why learning is *still* so important (or why you should attend Scan-Agile '09)

Last year I wrote a very personal story about how learning made a huge difference in the life of two people of similar age and in a similar context.

Check out my story about Grandpa Tony and Grandpa Frank (BTW: it's a real story!).

So, this year I thought of finding a different way to talk about how important it is to learn continuously to ensure our best options to survive in our jobs.

I'll pick a few sessions from the Scan-Agile '09 conference to explain how you can actually use what you will learn in those sessions to improve your skills and your career.

Let's take the example of the workshop "Executable Requirements in Practice" hosted by Pekka, Juha and Janne. In this session you can learn about one of the most important practices in SW development today.

Making sure that you continuously develop software that meets needs that are identified throughout the life of a project is a basic success criteria. How do you do it practice? And how do you do it in a way that does not transform the test specialists into click-robots?

Executable Requirements is a simple term to describe what tests should cover in practice: Requirements. Executable because we need to be able to run those tests 100's of times in a typical project and people are not very good at doing the same thing 100's of times, therefore we need to have those in a executable form to be able to run them over and over again.

In this session Pekka, Janne and Juha will explain how they've actually done it! Not theory, but experience.

In many aspects their work is quite unique world-wide and we are very lucky to have them present this in Scan-Agile. Look-out for this "Executable Requirements" to become a trending topic in Agile circles and come to Scan-Agile '09 to learn all about it!

Check out the complete schedule here and register here.

Photo Credit: David Den @ Flickr