PSQT conference report

Last Wednesday, I attended (and spoke at) the practical software quality and testing conference. This year they have cut the actual conference to one day, but it is sandwiched on both sides by two days of tutorial presentations.

The opening keynote was by Ed Adams of Security Innovations. Ed's talk covered a lot of material, but provide a good overview of how testers should think about security testing. He included a few stories that were interesting (even though I think I heard all of them before).

I attended a track session by Marnie Hutcheson presenting a case study she did on exploratory and structured testing. The results were pretty much what I expected, but I always appreciate a talk based on a case study, and Marnie did a good job capturing appropriate and relevant data and presenting a compelling case. I'm looking forward to seeing her publish her data and get more feedback from the overall test community.

Robert Vanderwall from Citrix gave a presentation on static code analysis. This is a topic that I've spent a big chunk of my career investigating, so I didn't expect to learn a lot of new material. Robert had a good approach to the concept and shared specific examples and feedback from his team's own experiences with static analysis. Truthfully, I attended this talk primarily to see if I could steal a few points since I'm presenting on static analysis next week at STAR. However, Robert kept me so interested, that I forgot to take any notes.

I thought my talk went well. As I usually do, I probably told too many anecdotes early, and ended up rushing a bit at the end. I had several of the other speakers attend my talk (which is always flattering for me) and we had a very interactive session which I hope got people to think a bit differently about the role of test. After the talk, I ended up talking with Warren S. Reid, who I discovered was the afternoon keynote speaker. He is a fascinating guy and extremely intelligent. His keynote was full of relevant information, and he obviously has had training and experience in public speaking, as the hour flew by. I've been to plenty of conferences with poor speakers (even as keynotes), so Warren's talk really set the bar.

This is the second time I've been to this conference, and I will probably go again. I like the one day format because it gives us west coasters an opportunity to fly down (to Vegas) in the morning, then fly back at night. For this trip, I spent the night, but I think next time that I'll try to do it in one day. I heard great things about the tutorials, but since I did not attend any of those, I can't really comment on the full week package.

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask. See you next week for a STAR East report.

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