CAST has once again come and gone. I’ve had a little bit now to let the experience simmer in my brain so it seems like a good time to write some notes down.

Prior to cast this year there was a full day peer conference, test retreat. This was my first experience with the peer conference format so it was a lot to take in. It will be really difficult to spill what we talked about in a blog format so I’ll settle with listing the sessions I went to for now. Each of these was lead / facilitated by the person that suggested the topic. I suggested the deliberate practice session. This is a very difficult topic and my main take away was that there is a significant amount of work that can be done here and that I want to be involved in it.

  • experiential simulations (Jesse)
  • deliberate practice (mine)
  • stop faking it (Michael)
  • interviewing testers (rich)
  • exploratory test retreat (markus)
  • write stuff (matt)

CAST started for me with a full day tutorial on coaching software testers via skype put on by Anne-Marie Charrett. This was a wonderful experiential session. The tutorial was organized around a model of coaching developed by her and James Bach. We worked through the tutorial by discussing some aspect of the model and then working through that theme in a live coaching session. If you have not had a skype coaching session with Anne-Marie, I definitely recommend it.

This is what I attended during day 2 and 3 of the conference:

Day 2:

Day 3:

It really is difficult to share the experience that is CAST in the medium of text. It is unlike most conferences out there. I encourage you get there next year and experience it for yourself.