TESTING IS LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATES….

AND LAME CONFERENCES ARE LIKE FREAK SHOWS

Step right up and see the bearded lady…..pay your money and hear the greatest minds in testing today….

I’ve been looking for something meaningful to exercise my mind lately. I’d really, really like to go to a conference that has a lot of speakers that look at testing from a different perspective than I do or read something that could expand my horizons in interesting and productive ways.

I took a look at the CAST conference. I was excited about the speaker base, with a few notable exceptions, and I’d like to just go somewhere and sit and LISTEN to some bright minds in the field talk about their ideas and experience.

What a disappointment.

The conference has a “theme” and that theme is things learned from other professions that are applicable to the testing field. I think the participants had to reach for their topics and I doubt I’d find it particularly relevant or mind-bending.

Cem Kaner, someone I admire tremendously (although I don’t always agree with him), is talking about using checklists as an aid to testing. My staff do that every day. Rob Sabourin, who is funny, intelligent, and innovative, is talking about equating medical triage to defect triage. In my region of the country, we have defect triage meetings and the corollaries are obvious and in wide-spread use.

Michael Bolton is talking about music and testing; that one amused me. Michael Bolton often amuses me, but not for any of the right reasons. I was a music major in college; he couldn’t have picked a topic less suited for the type of testing he advocates. Music is scripted. You can’t really GET more scripted than music. Jam sessions and cadenzas are the only exceptions. And unless the results of those are taped or written down, they can’t be reproduced. And you have to be a tools (instrument) expert to play well. Add to that a need to understand how to read music (code) and a complete understanding of basic terminology (which is the same world-wide), and you can see why the potential corollaries seem like the polar opposite of the preferences of an agilista.

There’s someone speaking about magic and testing; frankly, I think smoke and mirrors have more in common with project management than testing.

So I was bummed out and decided to pass on that one. The search continues…

And why is testing like a box of chocolates? Because you have to try every flavor, of course!