Recently I attended STPcon, Software Test and Performance Convention, put on by BZ Media.  It was held at the Marriott in San Mateo CA, not far from the San Francisco airport.

The first day was a session on Rapid Testing presented by Michael Bolton (no, not that Michael Bolton).  It was a shortened version of a three day session he usually presents.  It was a fantastic presentation.  Michael is a great speaker and great teacher.  I have been reading his articles in various magazines for a few years now.  It was great to see him in person and learn from him.  He talked about rapid testing techniques, new ways to look at exploratory testing and how to find the highest risk defects fast.

The keynote speech was from Rob Sabourin on testing in an scrum environment.  Like Michael, I have read many of his articles as well.  He is a dynamic (shall we say animated?) speaker.  He has a wealth of experience in software testing and is willing to share.  As an added bonus, I got to ride with him on the shuttle to the hotel and from the hotel back to the airport.  I greatly enjoyed the conversation.  Thank you for sharing Rob.

There were some other great speakers there as well including Matt Heusser and Hans Buwalda.  They also set up plenty of time during the conference for networking.

It was a terrific conference.  I have been to general software development conferences before  but this is the first one specific to software testing.  Software testing seems like a relatively unknown portion of software engineering.  Sure, there are lots of articles on test cases and test plans.  But really looking at what software testing entails, what a good tester does when hunting that elusive bug, what separates the average tester from the great tester is a vast field ripe for exploration.  This conference renewed my excitement to join in the discovery.

Scott Schimanski