Sunday, May 10, 2015

CAST 2015: For Managers

I have been working with a group of people preparing for the 10th annual CAST - the Conference of the Association for Software Testing - in Grand Rapids, Michigan this coming August. 

The program was announced recently here.

We had over 100 submissions to work though and very few spots to fill which made deciding what proposals NOT to select far more difficult than which proposals TO accept.  After some discussion and back and forth exchanges, we pulled together what I think is a solid program

While we don't do formal "tracks" as some conferences do, today, I am looking at the sessions I believe to be of particular attention to Managers.

Josh Meier is presenting an interesting take on Culture of Quality. He'll be looking at the "Quality is everyone's responsibility" meme that gets cited so often by so many people. What makes this look interesting is that Josh is speaking from experience, as opposed to theory so many cite.

Ken De Souza is presenting a session on Feedback. Many people, including managers, struggle to give (and receive) meaningful feedback at any point in their career. While this is a challenge for people in supervisory or coaching/mentoring positions, Testers are giving feed back to other people, even though it is not often recognized as such, as in bug reports. 

Jeff Woodard is presenting a slightly different take on Feedback. In this case, Jeff is discussing how to use feedback to get to a fact-based evaluation and determining what is real, or not, for a team. 

Megan Studzenski is presenting a session on Training and Developing testers. This is something that is challenging for many organizations - getting people to be able to contribute in a meaningful way as quickly as possible even when they have little or no testing experience.   

Joseph Ours is presenting a session that I think managers in particular might find useful on Metrics.  He'll discuss the purpose of measurement tools and how to leverage measures and metrics effectively. 

Rob Bowyer has a session on Hiring. Simply put, hiring good testers is hard. Getting hired as a tester can likewise, be hard. This looks to be an informative session for managers and anyone else who has struggled with interviews for testing positions.

Right. There are many more sessions. Some folks might find greater value in some sessions than in others. That is often the way at conferences, I guess. These are the ones that, looking at the selected sessions, look like they'll have ideas specifically applicable for Managers.

Early Bird Registration ends on June 5.  You can find information on Pricing and Registration here and information on the host hotel and venue here

I look forward to seeing you in Grand Rapids this August.

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