Öredev conference

I can only say WOW! And I dont mean an online game, but only mean to express myself. Öredev was my first conference after school, but certainly not the last. So where should I start?

 

Well, I started off with the course Innovation games as I already told you about. So the third day (first conference day), I was attending Karen N Johnsons course “SQL for testers”. Since we were only three people attending, it was a really nice and cosy thing with much space for open discussions. I am actually not new to SQL at all, but it was great getting some insights in actual testing work from Karens experience. I would never have imagined how many bugs could be derived just from looking at a map of the database structure. From my perspective it was really nice to get a starting point in new consultant projects. Apart from the basic SQL queries and insertions, we got to know certain areas to start looking for bugs when working with any system running on a database. Karen went through the material in an exceptional way, even though not used to this small kind of class. 

 

The rest of the conference was awesome. I attended as many sessions as I possibly could in the Agile, PM and Test tracks:

Keynnotes with Ted Neward, James Bach and Uncle Bob Martin

Isabel Evans on blind men and elephants, different people have different views of things

James Coplien on Agile finetuning

Diana Larsen, Agile for managers

Mattias Göransson on Heuristic testing

Rikard Edgren on Testing creativity

Luke Hohmann on Who does what in Agile

James Bach on Exploratory testing

Karen Johnson on storytelling

Fredrik Scheja on requirements

Torbjörn Ryber on Context-driven test design

 

Those were all really interesting, although some more. I got into a really long and interesting discussion after Lukes session, where a marketing perspective was put in the agile context, touching the matter of what the agile roles are supposed to do and compared to traditional product managers etc. The discussion was mainly between Cope and Luke, although I am proud to say that I was actually able to get some really important points in here and there, with both of them agreeing to what I said, but at different times. On the last day I got into a discussion with Uncle J (James Bach), and he really had some things to say. I must say that I have gotten very influenced by his attitude to testing, since this is actually what I have thought about it as well.  I also met up and talked some with Isabel Evans, really interesting person that has alot of experience to share. Well, enough about the bragging who I met, I now at least know that these people have their opinions because they have their views and experience of things. I could go to conferences in eternity, and this was my first one, but what really matters for knowledge is experience, and that is something that comes with time. I just need to maximize the experience per time unit.=)