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.

Using retrospectives and extracting lessons learned are common tools teams use to evaluate a work effort and come up with ideas about what to do again, what to avoid, and what to do differently. This can be a fabulous opportunity to explore processes, team dynamics, organizational influences, external factors, personnel issues, management strategies, guidelines and procedures, tool support, skills, and anything else that contributed to the team’s success or failure in achieving their goals. But far too often, lessons learned exercises are forfeited due to lack of time, priority, or interest. Even more tragic is when the time is spent improperly – playing the blame game, venting sessions with no action, gathering data for performance appraisals, etc. – retrospectives can become demoralizing, cause people to participate poorly or even avoid the exercise altogether.

Overall, turning the critical eye toward our own work, analyzing our own failures and shortcomings, can be a difficult task. So I suggest we do it more! Especially if retrospectives and lessons learned sessions are not done or done poorly on your projects. Let’s perform personal retrospectives! We can file bugs and perform assessments on ourselves. What we discover can inspire change and personal evolution (and sometimes revolution!) leading to things like establishing favored protocols, reducing unproductive habits, seeing and avoiding traps, finding skill and knowledge gaps, identifying the need for mentorship or opportunities to mentor others, or whatever else you need to become the best master craftsman you can be.

In this session, Dawn will illustrate how she has used introspective retrospectives throughout her career to learn from her experiences – not only to improve personally, but to generate lessons learned to share in coaching and mentoring sessions, conferences presentations, consulting engagements, and training courses. What will you learn, or re-learn?  

Rob and Scott will share with you their lessons learned at CAST 2013. This is sure to be an energetic tour de force of this year's conference and you won't want to miss it.