Short Story - we had a great time and learned a lot. It probably didn’t suit us as well as it could have (since we’re not currently QC customers–just QTP), but a few of the track sessions were excellent. There was one I would even call “validating” to both our approach to Mercury’s products, and to the direction we’re headed in as a QA organization.

Will and I gave a presentation on the All-Pairs technique, something we haven’t really talked about here but which we’re both big fans of. The slides are up now that the conference is over, and I put a lot of notes in there to fill in the blanks for those who missed the talk.

Long Story

There wasn’t much going on with the conference Saturday or Sunday (registration and some 1-on-1 time with Mercury people), so I sat in the sports book at Bellagio and made modest wagers on various sports teams, enjoying the accoutrements supplied by the generous waitstaff. That is to say, if you’ve got a couple days to kill, go get blitzed at the Bellagio. The drinks are free as long as you’re gambling!

Monday morning was mostly about the big-time speakers, the Mercury CEO, Jared Diamond, and a couple others. At the first track session (I won’t mention which, because there’s no need to call anyone out after the fact), I walked out during the Q&A, wondering whether the presenter(s) was/were idiots or I had just misunderstood. After I got out, the VP of IT for Citigroup was nearby, commenting on how that session was a bunch of BS, and how did it ever make it into the program… So, at least I can say I reached the same conclusion as a Citigroup VP…

The next session was purportedly an examination of Agile methods in conjunction with Quality Center and Business Process Testing. I didn’t see anything in there that told me the presenter had ever really been a part of or studied Agile methodology. He kept referring to “ways to keep your agility in testing”, and “how to stay flexible in light of constant change”, and that’s good stuff, but it’s a far cry from talking about SCRUMs, iterative development, feature-complete delivery at milestones, story cards, etc. It ended up just being the third time we got a demo of Quality Center. I left during the Q&A there too… very disappointing first set of track sessions.

The next morning started great–”Functional Testing of Web Services” by a guy from Mercury. Fantastic session. He covered just about every question I had had about the QTP Web Services plug-in, and got me excited about using it. We have a home-grown tool we use to test web services, and it’s good (I wrote it ;) ), but it’s not as polished as this one. This would also give us the ability to unify the web services test results with the web app test results.

We skipped around the next session (figuring that nearly every one listed would just be product demos we’d seen before–and we were right), but at 2 there was an excellent talk by Ryan English from SPI Dynamics. He covered ~8 different types of security defects common in web applications, along with both automated and manual suggestions for how to test for them. I’m disappointed that the slides aren’t online, because it was a crash course on everything that’s wrong with web software (from a security standpoint).

Wednesday morning we rehearsed our own presentation and watched as Marika Lazi, VP of IT for Bear Stearns, rehearsed hers. It was called “Automation of Edge-to-Edge Testing”, and covered many of the kinds of problems Will and I have when trying to automate our own testing without the suite of QC products. She was sharp as a tack and very realistic in her approach to automated testing. I was glad to see that it wasn’t just a sales pitch by a sales person, but a real stand-and-deliver from someone who sees the trenches every day even if she doesn’t live in them.

After lunch, Will and I gave our presentation. I have to say that the A/V equipment and management at the Bellagio is probably about the best it could possibly be. World class, really.

I think our talk went pretty well overall, though I was disappointed that nobody in the audience had ever heard of the Inquisition! We met a bunch of people afterwards who had some great comments and interesting insights, and my hope is that we hear from one Martin O’Brien again, who showed us an amazing Neural-Network-based test case processor-generator that could execute billions of test cases in short amounts of time. He left us with a million questions, but no contact info.

Did I mention the amazing food? At lunch every day and at dinner Monday and Wednesday, I enjoyed some of the finest dining I’ve ever been around… and not just because it was free. It was great all the way around. Mercury sure knows how to throw a party.

I could talk about the gambling, the drinking, the fact that I’ve officially been to both a Vegas nightclub and a Vegas ultra-lounge (and my company didn’t pay for a dime of it!), the ~20 hours of football I watched, only sleeping about 12 hours from Sunday to Thursday, actually winning money at poker, and all sorts of other stuff, but I’ll just leave it in Vegas. I had a great time, didn’t spend nearly as much of my company’s money as I could have, and didn’t even put an ounce stress on any marriage vows. All in all, if you have to spend a week attending 20 presentations on a fairly dry topic like automated testing, I can think of worse ways to spend said weeks.

Hope everyone got as much as I did out of it, and I hope to see you all at the Venetian next June!!

Tags: Mercury Interactive, Mercury-World, QTP-Automation, Software-Testing