Carnival of Testers #15

A lot of conferences this month - a real feast - almost an Octoberfest. Or was it a case of watching repeats on TV?

If you're a festival fan, a watcher of repeat TV or on the look-out for something new there was something to be had this month.

Repeat Questions?

• Pradeep Soundararajan wrote a piece about labels in testing, specifically the domain label. Read the post and the comments, here.
• A question about measuring tester efficiency prompted Shmuel Gershon to not follow the numbers game and show just how difficult that is to answer.
• Dave Whalen his view on the QA vs QC in testing topic, here.
• Testers who code or not was a topic of a James Christie post and he even managed to get a football reference in!

Agile Testing Days

• Markus Gärtner was doing some sort of blogging marathon producing reports from many of the talks he visited: Lisa Crispin's talk on agile defect management, Janet Gregory's talk on learning for testers and Rob Lambert's talk on structures killing creativity.
• Zeger Van Hese made some write-ups, this post on the day 3 talks could make you wish you'd been there.
• Rob Lambert was giving his alternative angle on conference with a series of video snippets, here, here and here. And to show he hadn't forgotten to blog he also did a write-up, here.

STARWest

• Jon Bach wrote a piece about an impromptu flash mob exploration session out in the corridor. Ideas for a new class or lightning talk?

STPCon

• A fun presentation of some aspects of combinatorial testing was presented by Justin Hunter.
• A sense of variety at STPCon was had from reading Matt Heusser's roundup, here.

SWET
The first Swedish Workshop on Exploratory Testing was held this month. It generated a certain amount of buzz and energy, with several people setting down their thoughts:

• A view from Simon Morley, here; from James Bach, here; a semi-transcription from Rikard Edgren, Henrik Emilsson and Martin Jansson; Ann Flismark's view, here; Christin Wiedemann's view, here; Oscar Cosmo's reflections (in Swedish), and here (in English).

Challenges
Challenges are popular and this month saw a couple of interesting ones.

• A challenge on deconstruction and contextual inference came from Zeger Van Hese. 
• This prompted Thomas Ponnet to walk through his answer and thinking.
• Darren McMillan wrote about an impossible(?) challenge, here.

Miscellany

• A review of Naomi Karten's book on presentation skills was the subject of a Lisa Crispin post. I'm tempted to purchase...
• A good reminder on the importance of interpretation was given by Zeger Van Hese, here.
• If you're wondering about how to think about test estimation in your project, you'll be set on the road to clearer thinking by reading Michael Bolton's post on test estimation in projects, here. It's the fifth installment of a group of worthy reading.
• An angle on pro-active (or is it pre-emptive?) testing was given by Darren McMillan.
• An intriguing idea of Test Proposals was presented by Martin Jansson, here.
• It's been fascinating reading about James Bach's journey across Europe - this one from a stop in Romania. I just can't get the theme tune for Rawhide outta my head now...

Until the next time...