Free Test Conference Norway, 2010 - feedback

I have been speaking at Free Test conference in Trondheim, Norway last week. Even though we had not so many participants (~50 people vs. ~70 last year), which is probably due to the recession w/w, the atmosphere was good, and people really liked to get more knowledge. My talk was about Root Cause analysis - dealing with problems not symptoms. It dealt with an enhanced way for performing root cause analysis, using the 5ys and cause effect diagrams methods, enabling the outcome to include priorities in it, thus helping us pick the right improvement route to reduce chances for the problem to occur again (you may find it also on the testing experience magazine, volume 4, January 2009).

Other speakers I heard were Michael Bolton, Canada, who spoke about Median and the things be gain vs. the things we loose if we are over heating this median. Asha Jyothi Venkat Meruvu from India, spoke about the TestLink, open source tool for test management, and how it interacts with other tools (like Bugzilla, etc'). I also went to an interesting talk by Mike Scot, UK, who spoke of the Testify open source tool for quick infrastructure for test automation with Fit/Fitnesse, Java, etc'. The topic name was: 'Testify - One button test driven development tooling'. Mike presented the package he built quickly, and seems that it is easy to maintain and get things on ones test automation going fast.

Martin Gijsen, Netherlands, gave a nice view over the evolution of test automation, with clear examples and the right touch for business keyword driven approach. I guess KDT is here to stay...

Bernt Marius Johnsen, Norway, spoke of random generation of data, used with specific grammar of SQL sentences, to 'bomb' a few DB products (Like MySQL, Apache Derby and PostgreSQL) to find defects - which they do in his report.

Henri van de Scheur, who was the program chair, together with his dedicated organization team, worked a lot to make this conference a reality, and have succeeded in my eyes. Data, the organizer supporter deserve a lot of thank you on this, and I hope they will support the conference next year as well.

So, in general it was good choice of topics, and I had a lot of interest in those presentations, and it was fun as well! meeting interesting people with the same passion for test tooling, automation, and testing in general...

I am waiting for what next year is going to bring us...