I will be attending STANZ 2009

I hadn’t originally planned to go to the STANZ conference this year, but at the last minute they added two additional keynote speakers, James Bach and Julian Harty of Google, and it’s hard to pass up an opportunity to catch up with James when he’s in the country. Also, as someone aligned with the Context-driven school of thought, any STANZ with more than one context-driven presenter is a good year, so I’m looking forward to meeting Karen Johnson.

I’ve attended James’ Rapid Software Test class previously, and my understanding was that the “Exploratory Testing Explained” tutorial is a one-day version of his RST course, so I asked what value I might get from doing the course again. James offered three reasons, but my notes appear to have gone missing and I can only remember enough to paraphrase two –

– The course materials change over time, so there may be new things if it’s been a while since you took the course.
– You may benefit from going through things again, to refresh or pick up new nuances.

A third, which James may not have mentioned, is that sometimes he gets those that have done exercises before to help out with their running, so that may be an added bonus if tester training is something you like to do.

One of the other reasons I’m attending STANZ this year is to network. In a tough employment market (I’m paying my own way to STANZ – ouch), extending my network is important, as is learning which companies still have budget enough to send their testers to conferences!

It looks like a good mix of presenters this year, although I was disappointed to see Karen Johnson’s test strategy workshop is Wellington-only. As per my recent post, I think this is an important area that’s underdone. Some of the feedback from the workshop I ran with Paul Szymkowiak at last year’s STANZ also suggested that this is an area of interest for many of us.

If you’re attending, and you’re reading this, make sure you go out of your way to track me down.