Complete personal plug, I must admit, but a recent interview with Rob Sabourin and I just made it to the web! Check it out:
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/software-quality/cast-2009-test-gurus-sabourin-coulter-preview-keynotes/
The author and interviewer was Mike Kelly, a director for the Association for Software Testing and a “sometimes independent testing consultant” working from the midwest. He interviewed Rob and I about our upcoming speech titled, “Tim Bits: What I Learned About Software Testing at CAST 2009,″ which will likely be the most exciting thing for me since that time I went skydiving. I can’t wait for the speech — and in fact, the whole conference! — and I look forward to seeing you all there.
Good news! The Association for Software Testing’s scholarship SIG has just released their first scholarship. They will be giving out money, free registration to next year’s CAST, and free memberships in AST to outstanding undergraduates who show excellence in software testing.
Are you an undergraduate? Do you know bright students who may be interested? We are currently taking applications and encourage all to apply. Deadline is November 30th!
http://scholarship.associationforsoftwaretesting.org
Author’s note: This post is wildly overdue.
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. I was thinking about how I’d write it — how creative I could be while introducing it — to the point where I never actually got to writing it. And you know what, ladies and gentleman? That’s simply atrocious, considering how absolutely awesome CAST 2008 was.
I enjoyed this CAST more than the other two previous CASTs. Though CAST 2007 sported a fun and enlightening certification debate, and CAST 2006 paved ground with an interesting but heated discussion after the first keynote, this CAST seemed different.
The biggest difference, I think, was that I wasn’t a student.
Rob Sabourin likes to talk about people going out in the world and being “blooded” after many years experience. I am by no means a blooded professional — I’m still getting dirt under my nails — but in the last year, I’ve gained a new appreciation for the “people” aspect of our industry. Whereas in college I focused on code, exams, homework and text books (to the greatest degree of perfection I had time for), in the real world I can focus on people.
At this CAST, I made an effort to talk to as many people as I could. Not only would I talk to them, but I did my best to find something interesting about what they had to say. Though I could have simply shied away or given into nervousness or not even cared, I met so many interesting people that I’d argue meeting people was the single best part of CAST.
Though the “people” aspect was likely the part of CAST I enjoyed the most, it definitely wasn’t everything. Here’s a few bullets that highlight my CAST experience:
- Getting on a plane with absolutely no sleep, making it to Toronto in good spirits and then exploring the city.
- Meeting people that I met at previous CASTs (shout out to Henrik, who was the first recognizable face I saw).
- Going to Jerry Weinberg’s tutorial, and meeting him for the first time.
- Being told I look Irish.
- Being told I look like Wolverine.
- Being given a staff badge by Paul Holland, making me feel as if I was part of the group (though I’m sure he just wanted to make me available to help
).
- Seeing Cem and Becky again.
- Going to a small Irish pub to see Michael Bolton & Nick Wolf play traditional Irish music.
- Getting tested by Ben Simo through his use of children’s toys.
- Seeing RobSab and his wife Anne’s presentation. (Absolutely beautiful, and even more beautiful that they can do it together.)
- Having a new analogy for manual test scripts that deals with diseased rats.
- Meeting the Dorset House Publishing people, who literally work right across the deck from The Open Planning Project in New York City.
- Being gently pushed to give a lightning talk. (Dawn, thank you for that.)
- Noticing as people took notes when I gave my lightning talk.
- Getting handshakes afterward when people told me it was a good lightning talk.
- Getting told that I could have a quarterly Tim-bits column in The AST Update (or another soon-to-be named AST magazine).
- Getting told by Scott Barber and others that I should publish a book of Tim-bits a few years down the road.
- Being told I look Irish, again.
- Being told I look like Wolverine — again.
- Going out to a pub with Michael Bolton and many others, and teaming up with Louise Perold for his bouncy-ball testing game.
- And finally, Hanging out with Carsten, Louise, Henrik, Ben and Chris during most of my CAST off-time.
And there’s more items I can list. Much more.
Overall, this CAST was a great experience, and I want to thank everyone who shared in that experience with me. Thank you, all.
This is gonna be a quick one, because, well… I gotta go spend my Loonies!
I’ll be in Toronto tomorrow for CAST 2008. For those that don’t know, CAST is the Association for Software Testing’s annual conference. On the docket this year is Jerry Weinberg, Cem Kaner, RobSab and many others. I’m excited.
Among the coolness of hanging out with Testing aficionados this week, I get to use the flight from NY to Toronto and back to further my testing history lesson. A few books mentioned to me finally made it to my doorstep, and the flight will give me a great time to read them. So much better than the subway.
What’s also coming out of the pipe (hopefully) soon is a personal project aiming to give a bit of stability to the crazy world of Javascript. I’ve spent the last year writing Javascript for The Open Planning Project, and after a bit of reflection, I feel like I, we, and the collective Javascript writers around the world are back in the relative stone age. Put bluntly and likely inappreciatively, Javascript is the C of browser languages. That’ll change soon, but in the interim — I’d guess four years before it reaches critical mass — we need a bit more stability.
Oh, and let me plug some Obama volunteerism real quick: If you’re interested, a couple volunteers and I are creating voter demographic maps using OpenLayers and Geoserver for Obama’s campaign in North Carolina. You can see a quick (and recent) hack-job here, though it will be password protected soon to accommodate sensitive data. If you’re interested in helping this mapping effort, or you know Obama campaign workers who could benefit from their own instance, feel free to join the OpenPlans project here.
And with that: CASTaways, I will see you tomorrow. Everyone else, goodnight!
From here:
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”.
Interdisciplinary approaches draw from diversified branches of learning or practice, such that insights can be drawn upon and synthesized to influence a particular craft. The CAST 2008 Program Committee is now seeking papers that explain how one, two or more disciplines might assist with software testing.
Read more.
If you have an interest in software testing, and have a paper or an experience report showing how multiple disciplines might apply, please feel free to submit.
