QA&TEST 2011 Conference

Cirilo Wortel recently attended the QA&TEST Conference which featured a strong list of speakers and a wide variety of talks on test automation, user experience, agile methodologies, and more.  His impressions covered several sessions that he attended (and one that he didn't).  Here were his thoughts on a high profile session presented by Ben Linders, the author of a hugely popular book on Lean Startup:

Continuous Quality Improvement using Root Cause Analysis by Ben Linders

A session I unfortunately did not actually attend to, but that I had an interesting discussion about with the presenter, was the conference closing presentation by Ben Linders called “Continuous Quality Improvement using Root Cause Analysis”. He claims that a team can accurately predict the number of bugs it is going to make during a sprint and he has developed a method to help reduce this number using root cause analysis. I found this a fascinating and somewhat controversial idea, I have yet to meet a developer (specially the ones in Agile projects) that can admit let alone predict they’re making bugs. But as I understood it works in a similar way as predicting velocity, you get more accurate as you go, using historic data from previous sprints.  --Cirilo Wortel

The other conferences he commented on included:

• Automated Reliability Testing via hardware interfaces by Bryan Bakker
  
• Runaway Test Automation Projects by Michael Stahl
• Pushing the Boundaries of User Experience by Julien Harty
  
  

It looks like this should be a strong conference for years to come for anyone who is involved with the testing of software.  With DevOps on the rise, that means a lot more people than it used to.

Source: http://blog.xebia.com/2011/11/02/qatest-2011-conference-impression/