Last time, coming back from the high of STPCon spring, I wrote about the fall conference (Oct 15-18 in Miami!) and the new, special, hands-on track we will have at the conference. Within a few hours of writing my post, the folks at STP put the
Call for Session Proposals up on the public website.
Let me be clear.
As it is, we are looking at a hands-on track for the conference, and it's going to be good. My expectation is to take things up a notch, which, for a high calibre conference, is hard to do.
I'd like to do better.
My goal is to radically change the conference experience, and I would like your help.
In the past, my school, the
Context-Driven School of Software Testing, has been accused of elitism, or an insiders club.
For this conference, I don't care what school you belong to if your ideas are good.
Maybe you are a security guy, or a performance tester, or into the lean startup. Maybe you have a magic javascripty tool that helps with a/b split testing. Maybe you have a technique you use to test mobile applications, or a way to decide what tests you can skip. Maybe you learned a cool scripting language that allows you to do really powerful repeatable stuff. Maybe you ...
aww, why don't I just provide a big list of possible talk ideas?
If you've ever wanted to give a talk but didn't know what to say, consider these:
1) No Spec? No Problem! Quick Attacks for web-based software
2) Test Case Creating - And Doing - In Real-Time with (Technique)
3) A Funny Thing Happened on my bus ride on my iPhone, or: Mobile App Testing HandsOn
4) How to build a log-file analyzer in (language)
5) How to be a hero at work by building your own supper-happy fun Diff File Compare tool
6) Fitnesse/SpecFlow/DBFit/Take your pick tool install hackfast
7) Jenkins and other CI tools for fun and profit
8) Penetration Testing In About an Hour
9) Performance Testing with (Tool) - JMeter? SOASTA? Telerik? Cloudstorm?
10) Testing Cloud-Based Apps with (Technique)/(Platform)
11) Using the Cloud to test with (Technique/Platform)
12) Testing REST Apis with (SoapUI?)
13) From Bare Metal to running selenium tests in about an hour
14) Just enough (PHP/Rails/HTML5/Flex) to do (purpose)
Of course, the Heusser-Style Comedy Title is Optional; the only requirement is that any tool you demo must have a significantly valuable free version. (Vendors will still have go through the traditional STP Route, which prevents pitch-talks and conflict of interest.)
Now if we have a massive outpouring of energy, we may even be able to schedule a few evening events. I mean, WereWolf was fun and all, but how about a HackAThon or a test competition?
What now?
Well, I can push, I can prod, I can suggest, but as a community, if this is going to happen and be successful, I will need your help.
If you've ever wanted to give a talk at a test conference, and have it be wildly different, valuable, and awesome, well, the
call has gone out.
The next step?
This is up to you.