Contributing to an all-star CAST
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Posted by Harry Robinson, Software Engineer in Test
Lydia Ash and I, both Seattle Googlers, recently gave presentations at the second annual Conference of the Association for Software Testing (CAST) held in Bellevue, Washington, on July 9-11.
CAST is an informative and challenging conference run entirely by volunteers from the testing community. We felt palpable enthusiasm for software testing throughout the event. In fact, if you had stopped by Quardev the evening before the conference, you would have seen a dozen testers from around the country preparing attendee packets, burning CDs, and having a great time arguing about boundary values.
Lydia's presentation (Data Set Analysis: Approaches to Testing when the Build is the Data) featured innovative heuristics used by the Google Maps team to detect subtle anomalies in large data sets.
My talk on The Bionic Tester showed how agile test automation can extend an exploratory tester's reach into complex features like Google Talk's Multi-User Chat.
On the second evening, we sponsored the first-ever Tester Exhibition in which several CAST presenters were asked to tell how they would use their expertise to test the CAST 2007 Registration page. The experts came at the problem from every direction and raised enough issues that the CAST organizers decided to disable the page prior to the Exhibition. :-)
Lydia Ash and I, both Seattle Googlers, recently gave presentations at the second annual Conference of the Association for Software Testing (CAST) held in Bellevue, Washington, on July 9-11.
CAST is an informative and challenging conference run entirely by volunteers from the testing community. We felt palpable enthusiasm for software testing throughout the event. In fact, if you had stopped by Quardev the evening before the conference, you would have seen a dozen testers from around the country preparing attendee packets, burning CDs, and having a great time arguing about boundary values.
Lydia's presentation (Data Set Analysis: Approaches to Testing when the Build is the Data) featured innovative heuristics used by the Google Maps team to detect subtle anomalies in large data sets.
My talk on The Bionic Tester showed how agile test automation can extend an exploratory tester's reach into complex features like Google Talk's Multi-User Chat.
On the second evening, we sponsored the first-ever Tester Exhibition in which several CAST presenters were asked to tell how they would use their expertise to test the CAST 2007 Registration page. The experts came at the problem from every direction and raised enough issues that the CAST organizers decided to disable the page prior to the Exhibition. :-)
Slides and follow-up material from all CAST presentations are available through the CAST 2007 wiki.
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