Over the years, Rob Sabourin has drawn important testing lessons from diverse sources including the great detectives, the Simpsons, Hollywood movies, comic book superheroes, and the hospital delivery room. Now Rob scores big with breakaway testing ideas from hockey, Canada’s national sport. Like star hockey players, testers develop skills and continuously adapt and perfect them. Like team “stats,” test metrics show how performance impacts business. Like the penalty box, a smoke test keeps flaky builds out of play. Like Zambonis, testers must reset environments to a known state. Hockey play-by-play commentary makes the game come alive. Likewise, test play-by-play commentary highlights critical skills and tactics for quickly finding bugs that matter. Hockey leagues foster contrasting styles of play. Context factors foster contrasting styles of testing. Rob shows how hockey camps can be a model for tester training regimes. Great hockey requires the right equipment—skates, sticks, helmets, and pads. Great testers leverage the right tools—scripts, simulators, analyzers, probes, and viewers—to find a wide range of problems quickly. Rob’s lessons from hockey can help you test better and faster and score by finding great bugs.
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Below find information on the featured keynotes at STARCANADA 2013.
Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR conferences. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consists of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. And now, lightning has struck the STAR keynotes. Some of the best-known experts in testing—Jon Bach, Michael Bolton, Fiona Charles, Janet Gregory, Paul Holland, Griffin Jones, Keith Klain, Gerard Meszaros, and Nate Oster—will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning. Get ten keynote presentations for the price of one—and have some fun at the same time.
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The last exciting era in testing was in the late ‘90s when the web turned technology on its ear, the agile movement overthrew our processes, and the rise of open source gave us accessible and innovative tools. However, since then, Jonathan Kohl finds it has been a lot of the same-old, same-old: more web applications, variants of agile, and testing tool debates. After a while, you start to feel like you’ve “Been there, Done that, Got that t-shirt.” However, testing doesn’t have to be a rehash of all the things you’ve done before. It is an exciting time to be a tester! Major changes are happening all at once. Smartphones and tablets have upended computing. Continuous release movements like DevOps are challenging our processes. BigData, the Cloud, and other disruptive technologies are fostering the development of new tools. These innovations are pushing testers in new directions. While this upheaval is challenging, it also offers enormous opportunity for growth. Jonathan challenges you to embrace these changes—and have fun doing it. Discover today’s amazing new opportunities, and how we can learn, adapt, and ride the wave.
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