My conference day 2 was disrupted before it had time to settle into any semblance of a pattern when the TESTHuddle guys invited me to speak (on their SoapBox). The irony of this was not lost on me as I’ve been invited to the conference to Blog about what other people have to say and now the hunter becomes the hunted…. Don’t get me wrong, I was up for it and I enjoyed it, but speaker mode and reporter mode are quite different. If I was to be objective and tell you how I handled it, I’d have to give myself a 7 out of 10. Competent and safe, no surprises within this context and no major issues.
I attended the Test Coffee pop-up session in the TESTHuddle space first up today, which helped my brain into gear in readiness for the DevOps Achilles Heel Keynote from Jefferey Payne. My initial reaction is to borrow a theme from last night’s Keynote and say EVERYTHING IS AWESOME. If only….
For my first Track choice of the day I dropped in on the Champions League Automation session. In truth, I’m a bit ambivalent when it comes to analogies for software testing – when they’re good they’re usually great (James Thomas kicked arse later in the day), but my feeling with this session was that the guys didn’t really understand enough about the essence of football to draw analogies from it. Shame really, as I think the analogy could work with the right skill set.
The most anticipated Track session (from my perspective) came up right after lunch today. It was probably a session that would have taken on a very different profile had there not been an inordinate amount of online chatter over the past 18 months about it. I am, of course, referring to Let’s Talk about the ISO29119 standards. I’m going to Blog about this in more detail later, but my initial thoughts are that various attendees came with fixed agendas, determined not to listen and to present their (already well known) objections. As a result of this, the session prevented those hearing the information for the first time from getting sufficient air time in which to better understand the rudiments of the standards.
The energy in the room at my next stop could not have been more different. I was fortunate enough to hear James Thomas assert that Your Testing is a Joke. Finally (IMHO) a software testing analogy that really worked. However, I would have to qualify that assessment by saying that the majority of James’ message was Lost in Translation on those who do not share English as their first language. I would also have to say that many of the nuances discussed would challenge all but those with significant experience in our craft. In short, this was my favourite session of the day.
As the day was drawing to a close I was settling in for the Lightning Strikes the Speakers session when we were presented with the most amazing rendition of These are a few of my Favourite Things from Dot Graham’s impromptu choir. Even though I’d heard this before, I have to say that if this rendition only required 2 hours of preparation then X-Factor is a realistic opportunity.
In closing my Day 2 Initial Thoughts I have to say that I feel the Lightning Talks mainly missed the mark. There were three exceptions – Michael Bolton, Kristoffer Nordström and Rob Lambert. As I said previously, I’ll provide evidence of why I make this assessment in my next Blog, which will be published tomorrow morning.
