STPCon Fall 2011 - Part IV

Thursday was perhaps the most relaxing day I had the week in Dallas.  I enjoyed a relaxed breakfast with a large number of testers and speakers at the conference - it is easy to relax when all of our speaking commitments have been fulfilled.

Some were still not quite done however.  There were a series of talks called the "Rapid Fire Challenge" with a key idea packed into a five minute presentation.  Dawn Haynes gave an interesting presentation around Tester Personalities.  Lanette Creamer gave a fun presentation on "Tester Tricks" (where she listed Adam Goucher as her "favorite tool.")  Mark Tomlinson talked about Risks and Costs of false positives in automation testing.  Scott Barber gave a cool breakdown on ideas that were useful for determining what to test and what not to test.  He called it FIBLOTS.  Cool.

Then, Fiona Charles delivered a stunning keynote on the question of managing Testing or the Testing Process.  Ummm - wow.  I was tweeting comments from that as fast as I could.  It was good.  It was really good.

From there, I went to Doug Hoffman's presentation on computer assisted exploratory testing.  Overall, I enjoyed it and got some ideas I need to consider.  The huge drawback was that there was simply too much information to squeeze into 1 hour and 15 minutes.  It would take at least a full day to get a good survey of the ideas - and a couple of days would be better. 

From there, I ran into James Pulley - a fellow SQAForums Moderator.  We had never met in person and this was a great opportunity. 

From there, I spent some time trying to get my notes in order, get things sorted out and "filed" so I could make use of it later.  The rest of the time there (which was not much by now) I spent it chatting with people, having a light lunch with Fiona Charles, Matt Heusser and Yvette Francino.  After that, Matt, Fiona and I headed to the airport for our respective flights out.

All in all, this was a remarkable week.