As mentioned in the previous post deciding to go to a conference like EuroSTAR 2012 is only part of the decision process. There are so many presentations and workshops to choose from that you quickly start feeling like a kid in a candy store; what to go at first?
Actually, there was a few choices that had to be made at the time of registering. As already mentioned I will spend the first day in Michael Bolton’s tutorial Critical Thinking for Testers.
Tuesday starts with a half day tutorial and I have chosen Right-sizing Test Documentation with Fiona Charles. There are many choices to make when deciding what to document and how to do it. I think it is important to find an appropriate balance so that the testers are able to spend as much time as possible testing instead of producing documents, and so the documentation produced actually serves a purpose in conveying information. New ideas and insights are always refreshing.
The last register-time-decision was for the Thursday afternoon workshops. For a while there I was really unsure whether to go for Beyond Testing with Markus Gärtner or Mind, Map and Strategy – Mindmapping a Test Strategy with Fiona Charles. Both workshops sounds really interesting and I am sure I could learn some good things from both Fiona and Markus. In the end, my choice was Mindmapping, to go with the Tuesday tutorial on Right-sizing Test Documentation.
So, for the rest of Tuesday:
The opening with Zeger van Hese and Alan Page’s keynote Test Innovation for Everyone is not in parallel with any other scheduled activities, so no difficult choices there… yet anyway. At an event like this I guess there is a risk of being sidetracked into an interesting discussion some where, but I hope to attend this. The keynote sounds interesting and inspiring.
Then we are back to hard decisions.
15:00 Starting the show with a presentation from the “Visionary” category sounds like an energizing way to go. I’m somewhat familiar with Rikard Edgren from his blogging on The Test Eye, and I look forward to his presentation Curing our Binary Disease.
16:00 To keep with the Visionary theme for Tuesday I decided to go for Testing through the Qualitative Lens by Michael Bolton. I might be fed up with him after the full day tutorial on Monday, but so far I have always found his presentations, articles and blogs highly interesting and very well executed. I am sure this will be another thought-provoking talk on how to make sense of your testing.
Then there is Wednesday…
+1 Testing 