On March 17, I was lucky enough to be at the fifth Swiss Testing Day in Zürich, Switzerland. I gave a presentation about crowdtesting. In this post I’ll try to explain my experiences on the STD.

The Swiss Testing Day is organised by SwissQ. That is the same organiser as the new Dutch testing conference in posted about earlier. The idea of the Swiss Testing Day is that is for clients and not only service providers and it was sold out! So there are a lot of clients around that are interested in the presentation that are given and what people in the exhibition stands are promoting. I like this idea for a testing conference and am hopeful the Dutch Testing Conference has the same effect on people there. As I had a presentation just before lunch I only visited a two other presentations. In this post I’ll give my view of the presentations I saw.

Keynote: James Whittaker – Testing on Purpose

James’ presentation was about how they now test at Google. His view of testing is that of the view of  doctor at his patient. With this he used a lot of new innovative tools to show the testing information to a testing team and, in particularly, him as Testing Director at Google. One of the things he showed was a lot like my idea for Augmented Testing. At Google they developed a layer over their search engine to see what test cases are and aren’t executed with what result. My idea is to take this even further, but technology is a factor here. Unfortunately James’ also promoted test tours as in his exploratory testing book, but for me that was not exploratory testing but a good way of regression testing through checking.

Track 3: Helmut Goetz – Why not use the Fast Lane to reach a higher Test Maturity Level?

The title of this presentation was a little misleading. The under title was about industrial model-based testing. Helmut works at Siemens AG in Germany and showed us how they at Siemens where using MBT to test their software. His conclusion was that MBT was a mayor success and he had the figures to back it up. The disappointment was when I was listening to the presentation that it was just like I wrote in my post about MBT. The original background of this post was written in December 2008. As the presentation of Helmut was characterised as an ‘Trend’ for a innovation this wasn’t so.