Difficult, difficult, lemon difficult

After convincing myself to invest in a trip to Amsterdam (for EuroSTAR 2012) I thought the hard decisions were made… then I was faced with the task of actually deciding what tutorials and presentations to attend. As Simon Foster so eloquently put it in the movie In the Loop: difficult, difficult, lemon difficult.

For those who has not yet learned the conference program by heart it can be found here.

Quite a selection of testing goodness eh? How is one supposed to pick only a few?

For Monday I must say Bob and Iris didn’t really get a fair chance. As opposed to the four other presenters I can not remember hearing about them before, and although I’m sure they have a great tutorial planned I am more confident about the others. Janet lost out due to me not really being involved in agile development, even though I would love to be there too. That left Dorothy, Michael and Rikard. Difficult, difficult…

After going over the tutorial details a few more times I finally decided. Both Dorothy and Rikard’s tutorials are about somewhat more advanced activities, while Michaels tutorial on Critical Thinking for Testers is in a way about more fundamental issues. Not that I think the tutorial will be basic or “easy”, but rather that critical thinking skills is more likely to be a good basis for both Exploratory Test Design (Rikard) and Managing Successful Test Automation (Dorothy) than vice versa. So, in order to build from the bottom up, rather than the other way around, Critical Thinking for Testers it is.

Now, that just leaves the choices for the other three days… and they are not full day tutorials but four parellel tracks of presentations!! (well, except the half-day tutorial on Tuesday)