Here's What You Missed at STPCon
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By Edward J. Correia
May 6, 2008 —
By the time you finish reading this, you’ll either be happily recalling your mid-April trip to California, or thinking about Boston in September. Or maybe—hopefully—you’ll be doing both.
If you were among those attending the Software Test & Performance Conference in San Mateo, you were treated to a dynamic list of speakers—a who’s who of the software testing industry. Names like Michael Bolton, Karen Johnson, Bj Rollison, Rob Sabourin and Mary Sweeney were just a few the nearly 50 speakers we lined up to teach you what they’ve learned over their decades in the various practices of software testing.
As we always do, the San Mateo STPCon offered tracks on security testing, performance testing, databases, Java, metrics, QA, management and automation. And feedback from students was terrific. This year we added GUI testing and analysis classes taught by none other than Jeff Johnson, author of the hilarious and popular GUI Bloopers book series, which lampoons hundreds of real-world interface design goofs, gaffes and blunders from all over the world.
I’m extremely pleased to report that Lightning Talks, an event new to STPCon and introduced here, was a huge success. Top-notch speakers included Bolton, Hans Buwalda, Doug Hoffman and Google’s Jason Huggins. There even was a light-hearted presentation by yours truly, which if I might, drew quite a few laughs. It told the story of a fictional test team with faces you’d recognize from just about every television newscast of the last 18 months. E-mail me if you’d like a copy of the slides.
Lightning Talks, for the uninitiated, take place in a large, theater-style room during a one-hour session. As the audience files in, they’re given baseballs made of foam rubber. One at a time, speakers were given five minutes to present their topic—the time was kept on a large animated online stopwatch. If a speaker went over their allotted time, the audience had the authority to pelt that speaker with their baseballs. And believe me, they did.
This session took place on day one of the conference, after the conclusion of full-day tutorials. It was so well received that many of the participants suggested we schedule a Lightning Talk every day (we’ve taken that under advisement). The talks were useful, people said, not just because they gave them a chance to “audition” speakers or in some cases get a preview of an upcoming class, but they also got to take out some of their aggressions, relieve some stress and have some good-time fun. When was the last time you could say that after a conference?
Then there’s HOTS, or the Hands-On Testing Showcase. This is an event we debuted at last year’s San Mateo conference, and it too was a smashing success. Also an after-hours event, HOTS vendors ply conference-goers with food and liquor while showing off their latest software. This year’s HOTS drew more people than last year, was more casual, and featured “sliders,” a popular hot sandwich that disappeared faster than the beer.
If you couldn’t make it to the West Coast show, we’ll be doing it all again this September 24-27 at the Marriott Copley Place in Boston. Why will it be great? Because we’re Crazy About Testing! But don’t just take my word for it. Listen to (and see) what attendees had to say!
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