The first week of December 2012 was just awesome! I got a chance to attend the RST Workshop (experience report can be read here and here) and then attended my first testing conference, the Test-ED 2012. I missed out on some very good conference like Bug-De-Bug because of my tight project schedules, but luckily this one was right the next day after the RST workshop and it helped! 🙂

Without much ado – Test-ED 2012 was just fantastic. I met many people in person who where only Twitter followers or Facebook friends! It was great to meet Ajay Balamurugadas, Justin Hunter, Savita Munde, Ravi Suriya, Sudhamshu Rao to name a few 🙂 The essence of the conference itself was to bring testers together and it worked like a charm.

The facilities were superb, the venue (MLR Convention Centre, Bangalore), the food and the hospitality of the Moolya team (especially DS and Pari) made it a truly wonderful day to remember 🙂

About the speakers – so much has been written about the conference by Mohit here and by Ajay here. I was Tweeting away live throughout the conference  – you can find my Tweets here. (Sorry about not providing the  hash tag search results – they does not seem to work now :()

James Bach on The Rise of the Thinking Indian Tester

It was fascinating to see the Master relating the Indian History towards testing. There were verses from Bhagawad Gita, Panchatantra, Tenali Raman, Tirukkural and many others. It was a proud moment as an Indian to sit in the audience and see the master praising our culture with words like “Indian culture has a history of cleverness.” James also spoke about “Maya” (illusion vs reality), Indian logic, dharma, diversity, joint families, patience – ideas that excites him from the Indian Culture.

The live recording was on all this time, so I hope Moolya Testing will provide us with the videos of all the talks at TestED 2012 🙂 (Hello Moolya, are you listening?)

Rahul Verma on The Death of a Test Case

This was one of the most humble talks I’ve ever seen about testing. You have to see it to realise that. One thing that stands out from Rahul’s speech – “There are no experts in the world, we all are learners at different stages”

Pradeep Soundararajan on Test Coverage Fist and Risk Informer Fist

He is our big brother, the big Panda for us all! and it is a treat to watch him speak about testing in his scintillating style. To top it all, here comes a testing talk with a martial art theme and a background score. How about that? 🙂

There where short EdTalks on Maps Mayhem by Justin Hunter, Continuous Deployment by Manoj Kumar and a very motivating little talk from Ramit Manohar.

I had to catch the bus back home so I missed the Open Season of TestED12. But this was a grand testing conference and I enjoyed every moment of it. Waiting for the next one!

It would be a crime not to mention the brilliant performance from our lovable host Sunil Kumar. Hey, buddy! You just rocked 🙂