Jaa

The road show is over

  • Artikkeli

I’m heading out from a busy 4 days in Munich. I had a wonderful time, and had fun with all of my presentations. The people at Siemens took fantastic care of me. My hosts made sure that I had absolutely everything I needed, and the the audience was appreciative and had great questions.

I arrived in Munich Sunday evening, and spent most of Monday wandering around the city. Eventually, I found my way to the Ciao offices and had a nice visit with their director of development. I wandered back into the city, looked around some more, ate dinner, and headed back to the hotel for some rest. That was the end of my “leisure day”.

The next day we were off to Nurenberg. After a bit longer than expected drive(Munich traffic can be bad in the mornings), I walked into a large room full of people waiting to hear me talk. I got set up quickly, and got through the talk without any problems (even the audio worked). During the Q&A, I remembered that the Q&A is what I enjoy the most. There were at least a dozen questions, and everybody stayed until all of the questions were answered (this was true all week, and is typically doesn’t happen at conferences in the US, and I think it’s a loss for the participants).

After a quick lunch in the cafeteria, I hosted another 90 minute Q&A session with a smaller number of people. This was followed by a quick tour of Nurenberg, dinner, and the return trip to Munich. It was a 12 hour day, but a lot of fun.

Tuesday was my keynote at Siemen’s conference – the talk was a lot of fun, and I met a lot of great testers. I was theoretically done for the day after my talk, but stuck around all day to watch the rest of the talks. From their, it was off to dinner with some Siemens folks, and then back to the hotel.

On Thursday, it was back to Siemen’s for my final talk on model-based testing. Before starting my talk, I was worried it may be too long, but I think I ended it a bit earlier than I anticipated. In the end, this worked out perfectly, because I think I answered questions for an hour straight after the talk. After one last meal in the Siemen's cafeteria, I headed back to my hotel, changed my clotes and took one last walk around town.

On my final evening, I was invited to have dinner at the home of one of the event organizers – they even cooked a German vegetarian meal for me. We had a great visit, had a short tour of their house, and after I stayed probably a little too late, it was back to my hotel for one last night of sleeping in Munich.

Overall, this was one of my favorite trips. I met some great people, and got to talk a lot about software testing. You really can’t beat that.

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