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":

Top 10 Tips for Test Managers from STP Online Summit

I had the pleasure of hosting the another Online Summit, delivered by Software Test Professionals: Test Management: Bridging the Gap Between Tests and Stakeholders.  The online summit format consists of 3 sessions each for 3 consecutive days.  The sessions for this summit were:

• Invigorating Your Test Team – Anne-Marie Charrett
• Talking to Triangles – Dawn Haynes
• Mentoring Testers: Leading from the Inside Out – Brian Osman
• Getting Your Testing MBA – Catherine Powell
• Whiteboard Test Team Management – Paul Holland
• Test Management for COTS Applications – Virginia Reynolds
• Motivating and Managing Distributed Testers – Karen Johnson
• The “Testing Bubble”:  Motivating, Insulating, and Protecting Tester – Ben Yaroch
• Top Tips from the Summit – Scott Barber
• Speaker Panel – Scott Barber, Karen Johnson & Ben Yaroch

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 Test Managers from:

Desperately Seeking "Performance Unit Testing" Examples

I've been talking about what I term "Performance Unit Testing" in classes and training courses for a long time. I've been teaching (more inspiring with hints toward implementation) client development teams about it for almost as long. Problem is, all I've got is stories that I can't attribute (NDAs and such) and that simply doesn't cut it when trying to make a point to someone who doesn't (or doesn't want to) get it.

So I'm looking for attributable samples, examples, stories, and/or case studies related to "Performance Unit Testing" that I can use (clearly, with attribution) in talks, training classes, maybe even blogs & articles. If you have something, please email me.

If you're not sure if you've got what I'm looking for, lemme share some desired attributes of what I'm looking for: