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:
- Key Note: A House Divided: Lessons Learned from Argument (Jon Bach)
- transforming an entire corporate testing organization (paul holland / brian demers)
- utter failures and lessons remained unlearned (ilari henrik aegerter)
- teaching the next generation (michael larsen)
- tailoring the testing time span (geordie keitt)
Day 3:
- Key Note: Introspective Retrospectives: Lessons Learned and Relearned (Dawn Hayens)
- what is good evidence (griffin jones)
- changing role of software tester (anna royzman)
- lessons learned since the four schools (markus gartner)
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.
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