CAST 2014 - Day 1

What an amazing first day. 

It started with a great talk by James Bach about how testing is not Test Cases. Test cases are just an artifact of testing, and much of our work doesn't invlove test cases.  This got me to thinking about how what we do is all testing, but very little is test cases, and those test cases are more of a group of ideas for the next tester to think about when they go to test.  Even if a tester was to use a test case with detailed steps, the a good professional tester  would still go "off script" to better understand what the test case was trying to illumunate. 

It was a very full day of learning and talking with other testers. It's been a full day, I'll write more about what I learned later. 

CAST 2014 - Day 0 (Tutorial Day)

CAST (Conference for the Association for Software Testing) this year is in New York at NYU. I've just spent my first day at the pre-conference tutorials.  I spent a really fun day hanging out with other professional testers and learning about how we as people discover things. IE, how do we as people examine things, make guesses as to what they do and refine or refute those guesses until we understand something.  It was a really good tutorial session lead by Anne-Marie Charrett. We were looking at  research from the social sciences by David Klahr and learning  from it so that we could use it to inform how we as testers could improve how we discover.

As testers we discover things all the time. We discover the quality of the item we are testing, we might discover good or bad quality, but the path to discovery is the same. Learning to examine the steps that we are unconsciously taking to make those discoveries allows to to take conscious control over those steps so that they can be refined and improved. 

It's been a few full days here in New York, I hope I'll write more later.