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By Edward J. Correia
June 10, 2008 —
Registration is open for the Software Test & Performance Conference September 24–26, 2008. The East Coast edition this year moves from Cambridge to the Boston Marriott Copley Place, in Boston. The city-bound conference promises to be the best one ever, with dozens of new classes and tutorials. We’ll also be introducing Boston to Lightning Talks and Open Panels, and bringing back the HOTS sessions that were such a success last year. More on those later.
We’re “Crazy About Testing” this year, with classes like “Test Strategy on a Whiteboard,” and “Explaining Testing to ‘Them’,” both by exploratory test pioneer James Bach. Bach is an extremely engaging speaker and consistently earns top feedback from anyone lucky enough to grab a seat in one of his classes. Bach’s also giving the show’s opening keynote, in which he’ll be “Redefining the Boundaries of Boundary Testing.”
After just one conversation with Bach, I knew immediately that his ideas were on testing were a cut above. Tell me if this sounds familiar: A designer tells you a boundary, and you go off and test one above and one below that boundary. To Bach, that’s just weak testing. “Boundary testing, when approached in an exploratory way, becomes much more powerful and more worthy of a skilled tester’s best efforts,” he wrote in describing his talk. Come to STPCon and hear him explain why testers need to rewrite the boundaries of traditional boundary testing to improve the outcome of this essential testing practice.
Also an important learning event is Lightning Talks, and often they’re also lots of fun. These are short, targeted presentations from a variety of industry practitioners. The fun comes if a speaker goes over the allotted five minutes; the audience will be armed with rubber baseballs.
And Lightning Talks aren’t just speaking opportunities for conference faculty. Attendees also are invited to speak. So call a meeting with your peers, come up with a technique that can be discussed in five minutes, and gather your courage to take the podium. We’re now in the process of lining up speakers. So e-mail me with your ideas and proposals soon; the session is limited to 10 speaking slots.
Other crazy classes include “The Buzz About Fuzz,” by security expert Joe Basirico. Fuzzing, the practice of pounding an application with random inputs to try and choke it, provides a simple, automatable means of trapping unforeseen errors. Learn the technique and how to include it in your QA efforts. After this class, you’ll be able to apply fuzz testing immediately.
Let’s face it—we’ve all had a boss at one time in our careers whom we’ve thought was a complete and total idiot. “Whether dooming projects from the start with unrealistic budgets and schedules, failing to allow people to use skills the organization paid big bucks for them to learn, or pushing projects into production before they’re ready, boneheaded bosses aren’t just to be laughed at in ‘Dilbert’,” says or requirements guru Robin Goldsmith. Architect of “Help Your Boss Avoid Being an Idiot,” Goldsmith, in this clever class, teaches how bosses get the way they are and provides techniques to increase the chances that both of you will succeed anyway.
Maybe you think it’s a good idea to “Measure Software Quality on the Way In, Not Just on the Way Out.” If so, you’ll want to reserve Thursday afternoon of the conference for Jan Fish, who received a standing ovation after first presenting this class. A 34-year veteran of testing and process improvement now with Phillips Lifeline, she’ll teach you how to use incoming failure rate to forecast future failure and determine the number of test-case executions required each day. “This lets you adjust resources, timelines or levels of effort day-to-day or week-to-week,” she says. After taking this class, you’ll be able to manage your testing effort using a simple spreadsheet in just five minutes a day.
Testers Choice Nominations End Friday
This fall’s conference also will be where we unveil winners of our annual Testers Choice Awards. Products of all types are judged in 17 categories ranging from Java to .NET, from data/test performance to static/dynamic code analysis, and from free, open-source to commercial test solutions. Nominations—which are typically submitted by the offering companies (or organizations producing the open source)—close this Friday, June 13. Let’s hope it brings no one bad luck.
Voting opens July 1, and all voters are automatically entered in a drawing for an Apple iPod Touch or US$300 Amazon gift card. Watch your e-mail for your personalized invitation to vote on the 2008 Testers Choice Awards. And I hope to see you in Boston September 24–26.
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