KG's 11 dimensional retrospection

I attended a conference PNSQC (Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference) held at Portland, OR. It was a nice conference - not that big, but many nice presenters presented interesting topics.

Here is the list of what I particularity interested:

Keynote: Project Patterns: From Adrenalin Junkies to Template Zombies
Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild

This is kind of typical "pattern" presentation regarding software project, but still he's very entertaining and insightful. He is the co-author of famous Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd ed [Dorset House, 1999] .

Keynote: Using Simple Automation to Test Complex Software
Harry Robinson, Microsoft

He is a Principal Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) for Microsoft’s Bing team. He showed how simple automation helps testing - this case, not a full fledged automation, but more like a automation as a tool for tester to reduce the workload. This is exactly I was looking for, and I was glad I hear it from someone from Microsoft who is a principal software design engineer in test.

The Good, Bad, and the Puzzling: The Agile Experience at Five Companies
Michael Mah, QSMA Software Project Estimation That Learns From Experience

He too was very entertaining and showed us "the numbers" of how agile process is better than legacy processes like water wall or out sourcing. Now we can use these numbers to persuade upper management (like CFO or CEO) why we need to move on to agile method.

Web Test Automation Framework with Open Source Tools Powered by Google WebDriver
Kapil Bhalla, Intuit

He showed how Intuit is using WebDriver and tools they developed to automate testing Web UI.

Workshop: Exploratory Test Automation
Harry Robinson

This was more in-depth presentation of the keynote speech he gave, with a little exercise.