testingReflections.com - events

ExpoQA 2008 in Spain

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 10:39:49 -0600

The week after Oredev, I’ll be presenting at the ExpoQA conference in Madrid Spain. You can read more here.

I’m surprised I haven’t blogged more about both conferences (Oredev and ExpoQA) but have been busy working. And now I need to pack …

Oredev 2008 Conference in Sweden

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 10:36:37 -0600

I’ll be in Malmo Sweden this coming week teaching and presenting at the Oredev conference. You can read more here.

If you'll be attending the conference or if you're located nearby and want to meet up, send me an email. It's interesting to meet other testers. I feel most fortunate to have the opportunity to be at the conference. It will also be my first time to Sweden, yahoo!

Latest Column -- Testing training: Disturbing behaviors of students

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 13:17:13 -0600

My latest column...

Drive-by training. Never heard of it? It is exactly what it sounds like. You drive to a training facility (or an instructor drives to you), for a day or three the instructor delivers the pre-packaged training class, then everyone drives back home. It's not the best training model ever invented. There is generally no student assessment, and the only instructor/course provider accountability is reputation. Even so, many good ideas can be shared and lots of students come away feeling that it was well worth "the drive."

As it turns out, I've been delivering a lot of drive-by training to software testers this fall. That in itself isn't particularly noteworthy -- end-of-the-budget year is a popular time for drive-by training -- but something that is noteworthy is that I have noticed a rise in some disturbing behaviors among the individuals and organizations that select and attend drive-by training.

At first, I thought it was just me. But after an informal poll (and some lively discussions) with my employees and trainer friends in the testing realm, I became increasingly convinced that the behaviors I'm noticing are not exclusive to me and that I'm not the only one who thinks they are on the rise.

Read the rest of the column.

--
Scott Barber
President & Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
Executive Director, Association for Software Testing
Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications

"If you can see it in your mind...
you will find it in your life."

Teaching Test Strategy at GLSEC

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:20:46 -0600

I’m teaching a workshop on how to build a test strategy at GLSEC in Michigan. The workshop focuses as much on creative thinking and strategic thinking as drafting a test strategy document.

Over the years, I’ve often focused on deepening and continuing my technology knowledge with less focus on business and strategic thinking. I’m sure this has to do with my background and comfort zone; I’m used to learning new technologies all the time but less used to thinking about business strategy. In recent time, I’m schooling myself in strategy as much as technology. Without a business background, it’s a less familiar learning path. And as a tester (in my experience), I often didn’t have to (or ignored) thinking much about strategy – at least strategy from a team or product point of view. My strategic thinking was more immediately-centered on breaking whatever application I was working with. But from the perspective of leading a team, there is more and other things to think through.

STARwest talking testing day number 3

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 03:43:07 -0500

I notice that James Whittaker finally started blogging in July. He recently blogged on STARwest, including describing Keith Stobie as “10 testers in one”. I would have to agree having spent the last day at STARwest at “California Adventure” (the park across the way from Disneyland) with Keith, talking testing and other topics as we queued for rides. It was my first testing talking day for a while .

As James started blogging, my blogging fell in a hole, but hopefully it is now back…. I got to have several dodgy quality experiences at Disneyland and California Adventure and at other places (some self inflicted!), that will either be blog entries or talk fodder in the coming year….. I may even tell some other STARwest stories as well, the lightning talk that became a full session that became a keynote, or the STARwest lightning talk that was going to have James Whittaker testing software disguised as Darth Vader!!!!! Stay tuned!

Free evening talk: Understanding Qa/Testing On Agile Projects

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:07:37 -0500

I'll be giving a free evening public talk in Clerkenwell, London for SkillsMatter on 8th September at 18:30pm. The talk is applicable to anyone on an agile team or running agile projects...

Testing is an integral and prominent aspect of agile development, however, new teams form and existing teams prevail with uncertainty about how testers fit into the process. Even those projects that don’t have testers dedicated to them can still feel there is a void in how they ensure that they are building the right product and building the product right.

I made CNBC.com (in a CAST press release)

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 01:19:42 -0500

High Demand Causes Three-Day Software Testing Conference to Add Fourth Day

Ok, so I know that this is all about CAST, and all about AST being true to it's word to adapt the conference on the fly to follow the energy and interests of the participants (in fact, that's why we refer to folks who come to the conference as participants, not attendees or delegates), and all about the fact that even during one of the worst economic years I can remember, CAST is so cool that we had to extend it!

I'm proud of whatever part I've played in making that happen as AST's Executive Director, and I'm extremely grateful to all of the volunteers who have worked hard to make this conference happen. In fact, if you're not already planning to be there, you should. It is the testing conference you won't want to miss, you know.

Ok, you guessed it, I came up with that tagline, but it is the one testing conference each year that I refuse to miss. Not because I'm AST's Executive Director, but because of the participation, conferring, facilitation, and challenging topics. So seriously, if you're still on the fence, (or your boss is still on the fence) take a look at the CNBC.com article http://www.cnbc.com/id/25091786/ (or take it to your boss), and then decide to come out and join us.

Testing Lessons From Civil Engineering

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 01:13:14 -0500

Below is the paper I submitted as a prologue to an experience report, discussion, and (hopefully) additional research that I'm presenting for the first time during:

CITCON Melbourne 2008 @ The Jasper Hotel

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 19:31:07 -0500

A followup reminder for CITCON, following on from my original post

After a venue search that started at Southbank and slowly crawled its way north across the Melbourne CBD as we discovered Melb conference venues were pricier than all the other CITCON cities, we finally have a venue!

The Open Information Foundation, co-founded by Jeffrey Fredrick and Paul Julius, presents CITCON Asia-Pacific 2008 in Melbourne, Australia.

AST Instructors’ Tutorial at CAST in Toronto

Fri, 30 May 2008 16:26:00 -0500

This post is largely copied from Cem Kaner's blog because I saw no need to re-write the same information :)

You’ve read about the Association for Software Testing’s free software testing courses. Now find out how you can get involved in teaching these for AST, for your company, or independently. This workshop will use presentations, lectures, and hands-on exercises to address the challenges of teaching online: Becky Fiedler, Scott Barber and I will host the Live! AST Instructors’ Orientation Course Jumpstart Tutorial On July 17, 2008, in conjunction with this year’s Conference of the AST (CAST).

Registration for CAST 2008 now open!

Thu, 15 May 2008 22:48:30 -0500

The 3rd Annual Conference of the Association of Software Testing (CAST) 2008

Toronto, Ontario, Canada, July 14-16, 2008

Beyond the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing

Keynote Presentations by Gerald M. Weinberg,

Cem Kaner, Robert Sabourin, and Brian Fisher

Tutorials by Gerald M. Weinberg, Scott Barber, Hung Nguyen, and Julian Harty

The Association for Software Testing is pleased to announce its third annual conference (CAST 2008), to be held July 14-16. The meeting will be held in Toronto, Canada, a city which features enormous diversity in culture, businesses, educational institutions, and the arts. Toronto is the perfect location for a conference on this year’s theme: "Beyond the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing".

You can view the most recent brochure here, and you can see the conference program here.

Baltic/Nordic region events

Sat, 10 May 2008 05:49:39 -0500

If you live in a small country like me, you may or may not need to travel too far to get to testing conference. There is an annual Latvia test conference and I know numerous conferences in Sweden. Although I don’t like to go to conferences too much, I try to learn about them and their content as much as possible. Here I share what I know about my region conferences and hope to learn more from you.

CITCON Asia-Pacific Melbourne Sat Jun 28th - Register now!

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:11:20 -0500

After a great conference in Sydney last year, The Continuous Integration and Testing conference (CITCON) is coming to Melbourne in 2008. It's an open space conference where we all meet the night before to propose and vote for sessions then spend Saturday sharing ideas and experiences, presenting, discussing and demoing. It was an amazing experience last year. The Denver CITCON has just happened (http://citconf.com/wiki/index.php?title=CITCONDenver2008Sessions) and June is not far away.

Hackontest - 24 hour opensource programming competition

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 17:14:18 -0500

I'm not sure why it is called hackontest, nor am I sure why the definition of 'hacker' used on their website highlights the 'clever programmer' aspect of its origins but ignores the 'learning programming by trial and error' (i.e. not necessarily knowing about designing for maintainability and other such things)...

But, they have a goal to advance one or more open source tools by having a day dedicated to adding new features to open source tools...

The Swiss Open Systems User Group /ch/open organizes the first international Hackontest sponsored by Google as part of informatica08, the Swiss year of computer science 2008. Hackontest is a 24-hour programming competition of three teams of different open source projects. Its goals are to enhance popular Free Software projects according to user needs and to demonstrate to the public how enthusiastically open source software is being developed.

Interested in proposing a project? Interested in voting for features? Interested in competing for the USD 8500 prize?

Well - if you are, check out the Hackontest website for more info...

No liquids in the cabin, no solids in the hold - the Heathrow T5 baggage shutdown

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:26:10 -0500

Anyone who follows the news would have heard of the opening day debacle at the new T5 terminal at Heathrow in London England that culminated in passengers only being allowed carry on baggage resulting in a pile of over 20000 bags, wryly described by one blog commenter as ‘No liquids in the cabin, no solids in the hold’. With normality seemingly restored after backlogged baggage sorting moved off to Milan, Memphis and across the UK, what can we say about what happened and could it have been avoided?