There it is, I’ll be speaking at CAST2014 in NYC this year. I’ve mentioned on twitter that I was accepted to speak but haven’t actually written about it yet.
Most simplistic measures for software productivity and quality fail, for reasons you don’t need a conference talk to explain. The problem is how to do better than that – how to “plus one” software measurement, or, at least, to choose measures and frame them in a way that will do more good than harm. Studying a little social science, specifically how social scientists do qualitative research, and measurement problems can help. Justin will talk about the development of qualitative research as a field of study, common problems with measurement in the software world, and some ideas from Lean. You will take back some tools to help you tell a more meaningful story to your business.
I’m in the session group before the last keynote on the last day. This feels a little ominous. If you include the tutorials, and TestRetreat before that, CAST is an intense 5 day marathon of deep discussions on testing and for me a bit of introspection. I will have to be sure to reserve some energy for the talk, especially since this is my first at a real conference, especially since I will be live cast over youtube. I have talks for the local testers group, and facilitated events and whatnot, but for me this is the big-time. CAST is the place.
The theme of this years conference is the art and science of software testing. My talk is themed around measurement. Mainly how it has been traditionally used in our craft, some of how it is used in the social sciences, and a bit on how we can make measurement a useful thing for software delivery and delivering value to the folks that pay for it. Measurement is a difficult problem, but I feel like talking about problems without offering alternate ideas to explore or solid solutions is not all that helpful. I’m hoping we can leave the room with some ideas on making the testers life a little bit better.
Hope to see you there!
Recent Comments