Bar Camp Texas: Testing Nirvana

Testing Nirvana presented some interesting approaches to testing and the technologies available for testing.  My favorite parts of the presentation was when the presenter noticed that, indeed, his slides were incredibly busy and the color scheme looked like it had some medicinal input.

While it was good guidance for testing, it failed to make testing cool ... although I'm not sure this is even possible.

The Bar Campers were made up largely of designers and web experts who dabble in web design and coding.  From the audience reaction, it seems like coding was something that they had learned on the job ... or hadn't yet really encountered.  If your background is in software engineering, this may seem impossible but a lot of folks become programmers without going through a curriculum.

Identifying the importance of testing reminded me of last year's keynote from Grady Booch at SIGCSE 2007:  Reading, Writing, Coding.  In this presentation, Grady Booch referred to a blog post about missing programmer curriculum.  I think I'll branch this discussion into a new entry since it's long and only loosely coupled to this entry.