Lessons from NEXT2012 in Romania

I often see folks blogging about what they learned, were inspired by, or impressed them about attending an event. it is far less often when I see a headliner, or promoted presenter blog about the lessons they learned or what inspired or impressed them after the event. I've often wondered why that is.

For me, it has a lot to do with needing to quickly shift gears upon completing an event to catch-up on all the things that I put off to prepare for the event, figure out what immediate stuff landed in my inbox while I was ignoring it, and to follow-up on leads, lessons, inspirations and curiosities from the event itself.

Well, I'm going to make a concerted effort to do better about posting my lessons from events, starting with NEXT2012, hosted by SoftVision, held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, Oct. 26-27
So, what were my take-aways from NEXT2012?

• I'm *really* excited about how I'm now organizing and packaging my performance-related materials (more on that in a separate post).
• SoftVision did a fantastic job organizing and handling logistics.
• I am seriously impressed with the people I interacted with on both a professional and technical level.
• Those same people are social, collaborative, friendly and are able to enjoy their work and create enjoyable work environments while being professionally and technically impressive.
• Romania (as well as several surrounding areas not widely considered "software/technical powerhouses") is an emerging market worth watching.

Training Performance Testers in Romania

Later this month, I'm headed to Cluj, Romania to deliver 2 days of performance testing related training, day 1 is conference style, day 2 is workshop style. I'm kind of excited about this, not *just* because I've never been to Romania, but because of the interaction I've had up to this point with the group organizing the event. The English version of the event webpage is http://conferinta.softvision.ro/en/

Top 10 Tips for Performance Test Tool Evaluation from STP Online Summit

I had the pleasure of hosting the another Online Summit, delivered by Software Test Professionals: Survey of Performance Testing Tools. The online summit format consists of 11 sessions over 3 consecutive days. The sessions for this summit were:

• A Survey of Performance Testing Tools Introduction – Scott Barber & Mark Tomlinson
• Neotys - NeoLoad – Bill Nicholson
• SOASTA - Cloud Test Performance – Dan Bartow
• BlazeMeter - The Load and Performance Testing JMeter Cloud – Alon Girmonsky
• AgileLoad – Adam Brown
• HP - LoadRunner – Shane Evans
• Web Performance Load Tester – Michael Czeiszperger
• Telerik - Test Studio – Jim Holmes
• Compuware - Gomez 360 Web Load Testing – Duane Dorch
• SmartBear - LoadComplete –Michael J. Punsky
• A Survey of Performance Testing Tools Tips and Panel Discussion – Scott Barber, Mark Tomlinson & Summit Speakers

One of my duties as host was to try to summarize the most valuable nuggets of information from across all of the presentations into a "top tips" list. This is what I came up with:

Scott's Top 10 Tips for Performance Testing Tool Evaluation from:

Can your website handle "instant celebrity"?

Ok, so I feel a touch voyeuristic even admitting this, but while I was checking on the latest from the Olympics I followed a link under Latest News -> Michael Phelps with a tag line of "What do you do after becoming the most accomplished Olympian in history? Date a model."

It was a tasteful piece about Michael bringing his (until now) "under the radar" girlfriend, Megan Rossee to some public event. Having (apparently like a lot of people) never heard of her,  I clicked on the link for her website (www.meganrossee.com)  in the article. What I got for my curiosity was *far* better than a bunch of portfolio photos of a model. I got the following:

Let's Test Raises the Bar for CONFERences

If you follow me regularly, you know that I speak at, participate in, help to organize, facilitate, sponsor, etc. a *lot* of conferences, you know I do my best to give praise where praise is due -- and Let's Test 2012, Stockholm Sweden, held May 7-9 is due plenty of praise for raising the bar for Testing CONFERences.

Lest I offend anyone inadvertently or unnecessarily, allow me to share with you how I categorize conferences.

1. Academic Conference: Summary presentations of detailed papers... frequently research based, infrequently directly applicable to industry. Papers are vetted in detail and peer reviewed (theoretically leading to high quality content, but that is a debatable matter of opinion)
2. Peer Conference: A 20ish participant, invitation only, pay your own expenses and no one turns a profit, intense 2-3day, tightly themed, facilitated, deep exploration of participants 1st hand experiences related to the theme.
3. Vendor Conference: I broadly think of this as any conference put on by a for-profit organization for the purpose of earning money, winning new clients, and/or keeping existing clients happy. I make no distinction between vendors of tools, services, training, or publications. This is what most people think of when they hear "conference"
4. CONFERence: A hybrid of Peer and Vendor conferences, focused on content and community, organized by non-profit or volunteer groups with no established financial goal beyond "break-even" designed specifically to encourage attendees to CONFER (i.e. self-manage discussions and interactions related to, extending, and/or debating presented materials, as well as simply taking the opportunity to get to network and build relationships w/in their professional community.

Personally, I find it somewhere between difficult and pointless to compare or contrast "goodness" of one category of conference with another. Each category has a purpose, a value proposition, representative instances of "good" and "not-so-good", and I've had both positive and negative experiences with conferences in each category. So do me a favor, and don't misquote this post as making "cross-category comparisons". Cool? Cool.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled blog post.



Ladies & Gentlemen, this CONFERence ROCKED! I simply can't say enough good things about it from beginning to end, but let me try to give you a summary of what's got me amped & making the "bar-raising claim":