It was the last SIGIST (special interest group in software testing) run by the BCS last week in London. It was reasonably well attended with the Key Note being from Tom Gilb.
I’ve seen Tom Gilb a few times over the last year and I believe his message is well placed for the testing community. I don’t believe I would ever perform his stakeholder analysis process or return on investment stuff but it’s a sound concept.
Highlight of the day was Steven Ramsay from Linklaters. His talk was honest and insightful and a real struggle against the corporate budget cuts the industry has seen recently. He gave real insight in to the difficulties faced by test managers; struggling to balance quality with reduced costs.
Sasha Gilenson was also quite good but I struggled to see how his new environment configuration tool would solve the many problems we all face. The concept is sound (i.e. knowing whether the live environment is different to the test one) but I don’t see how his software will solve this. I need to read a bit more about this.
Lunch was good as usual. Over lunch I attended a vendor demonstration from Fanfare Software. A tool called iTest. Despite the demo not working and the software not doing what was asked for a couple of examples when it did work it rocked. It looked awesome and gave the tester some really powerful testing approaches. Really good team who knew their stuff too. They had techies and sales people there capable of answering some of the tricky questions asked.
The Share Point was awesome. A guy called Brad Burton from 4 Networking gave a really loud, motivating and hilarious presentation on why networking is so valuable and how we should be thankful for the people we have in our lives over the material stuff we often aim for. Really good presentation. Really good personality.
Martin Gijsen then presented on Advance Key Word Driven Testing which was interesting but I didn’t really get the main message. It seemed to be lost in a series of questions and flow interruptions from the audience. He was apparently excellent in the tutorial though so maybe the message didn’t translate to the main stage.
He was followed by, to be brutally honest, a really poor presentation. I felt really sorry for David Harley because it appeared he had been given the notes on the presentation without seeing the slides in advance. It didn’t help that the notes and the slides didn’t even match. At the end I don’t think anyone knew what he was talking about and he himself seemed totally confused. There were also about 20 slides he didn’t even get to…….
Surprise ending was from Stuart Reid as Clive King couldn’t make it. Stuart did a good talk on agile and how to implement it. Very text book but good still.
Overall it was a good day. I’m going to be speaking at the March one in 2010 alongside my colleague Tom Quinn so if you get the chance to pop along that would be cool.