CAST 2013

Can’t we all just get along?” is the famous rhetorical question from Rodney King, lightning rod for a series of 1993 riots in Los Angeles. Police officers who’d beaten him with clubs a year earlier during a traffic stop were pronounced Not Guilty, fueling race rage to no one in particular, and L.A. communities were set ablaze by its own citizens.

In software testing, the riots are invisible, but the rage is out there. Maybe you’ve heard “testing is dead”; “automation will find better bugs”; “don’t bother testing, our customers will”; “we’re moving to a Center of Excellence model”, or “our certified testers are ‘elite’”.  Maybe your outrage is smoldering, triggered by bad management, bad metrics, unethical practices, and an industry that seems bent on replacing testing skill with the latest open-source automation platform.

If there’s anything that’s ever been out there that made you want to argue, but held you back, come vent with Jon in this keynote. As the brother to James Bach -- software testing’s most prominent lightning rod -- Jon’s short answer to the rhetorical “can’t we get along?” is “well, no, we can’t”.  There are good reasons for this: debate forms identity; argument fuels scrutiny; and being “contrary” reveals new problems and opportunities. The basis of the CAST conference was to provide a higher degree of scrutiny and debate – to welcome and foster critical thinking and challenges to speaker content. 

In this keynote, Jon talks about the power of conflict at work and in the software testing community. If “a house divided against itself cannot stand”, then let Jon tell you his opinion on why “good fences make good neighbors.