CAST 2012 - learning spree

I was sure this would be the highlight of this year and its getting exciting. I am here at San Jose CA to attend the 'CAST 2012 - The Thinking Tester' which starts tomorrow July 16 2012. 

I expected the Sunday to be a lazy one but it gave a glimpse of what next three days would look like. After breakfast we joined the #TestCoachCamp team for a small session and I am glad we did. Wish I could have attended the full session. We talked about the burn out among testers and how we can help others to get over it. Being a sole QA on a team of around 10 developers I can understand how an unmotivated burn out tester can never deliver best on projects. We discussed various approaches used by other delegates to get people going on their team and I agreed to each of them as I pretty much use them in my work daily. Here are the few that would help any QA on their teams:

1. Most of the times cause of burn out among QAs is repeatedly testing the same piece of software over and over again. Rotating people among various teams and modules on a regular basis will bring new energy and ideas.
2. This one is very prevalent in big teams and organizations. Testing teams during testing files bugs on a piece of code but they never get fixed because the development and product teams think that they are low priority bugs or they are labeled as invalid or not reproducible. This leads to demotivation among testing team and they often don't feel empowered to drive the quality of the software. QAs should be more specific in filing bugs, provide detail steps to reproduce the issue. They should work with product owners in advocating the priority and impact of bugs for a release.
3. Learning new technologies and automation tools & techniques is a great way to regenerate the energy in any engineering team. I have personally tried this and having regular learning session within the team could give a completely new direction to your burned out testing team.
4. Stand ups, tech huddles, retrospectives are the key to success of agile projects. But even the teams with considerably large QA members tend to ignore the issues testing team faces. Providing QA team with testing huddles and QA retrospectives gives a great platform to bring out and resolve the issues test engineers face on daily basis.

I would look forward to reviews of other discussion and learning that can be gained on other topics.

In the evening CAST celebration started with reception. Got to meet other delegates and Speakers, had some interesting discussions. Looking forward to the first day at CAST 2012....