This post is a little evaluation of the Dutch Testing Conference, that took place at the 21st April. I’ll share you some lessons learned of the use of a twitter during the conference and what the old heroes can learn from these developments.

Why should I write something about the DTC? Nathalie already wrote a post about this at her blog.

With 380 visitors the first time it was quite a success. The photo below give an impression of the audience during the second keynote.

Photo by Rik Marselis.

Use of Twitter
A couple of weeks before the conference I suggested to SwissQ to use Twitter before and during the conference. Because I know there are a lot of software testing Tweeps in the Netherlands (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) we can use this successfully. The only thing I need therefore was a free ticket to be there during the conference day. We started with a Twitter account DutchTestingC (because the name DutchTestingConference was to long we made a shorter one). The first week the amount of followers was growing but not fast enough to reach a lot of people with our account.

A couple of days before the conference we send out a newsletter to all registered visitors and sponsors, from that moment the amount of followers grew. At this moment we have 71 active Twitterers that are following us. The graph below shows you how the growth took place.

Some Twitter lessons
The second keynote was from Jurgen Appelo. He speaks a lot of national and international conferences. I thought these kind of people aren’t nervous anymore. But what did he say: “Tension is rising”.

This is just one of his tweets, check his other tweets about the conference. What you’ll see is that he is not a tester, but he has learned us a lot of lessons. The feedback at his keynote was positive.
Twitter is a very useful medium to get feedback from the audience. Here are two tweets of the same person about the two different key note speakers. As you can see are his feelings about the presentation different.

The first keynote was from Google, about testing and clouds. A lot of people from the audience wondering what the link with testing was for the software testers in the Netherlands. They expect a more flashy presentation.
As opposite the second keynote was a real success. Jurgen Appelo his presentation was very successful. A lot of interaction with the audience, some humor, funny slides and last but not least good content, I think everybody can use this in his daily business.

There are also a lot of spam tweets, and funny tweets for example of people that choose for the wrong presentation during the day. Unfortunatly for Pascal Dufour he missed the good presentations. Hopefully you get a new chance next year.

To see all the responses you have to check the thread at twitter #DTC10.
The last remarkable lesson I will share with you is a statement I have heard several times during the day. I wrote already a post about this, because I do not agree with this statement.

Are we the leader in software testing?
Some people have made the statement that we in the Netherlands are the top of structured software testing in the world? Is that the truth? Are we really thoughtleader? Do we develop the standards and methods that are used all over the world for software testing?

In my opinion there is a lot of development in the Netherlands about software testing. I’ve seen a lot of good presentations at the Dutch Testing Conference, but is this enough to be thoughtleader? Is sharing this information to the same testing audience as you always do enough to be thoughtleader? Or are these people only known testing guru´s in the Netherlands for Dutch structured testing crowd?

Last week Steven Machtelinckx made a top 100 of blogs about software testing. Only at place 39 and 82 are testing blogs from the Netherlands. If the amount of blogs is leading for the amount of development in a certain country, we are far away from the top.

A possible reason is: we in the Netherlands have a lot of old heroes that aren’t using the new and modern media like twitter and blogs. They are not visible for the new generation, they are even not connected to the development, discussion and interaction that takes place at the internet right now. If we do not change we´ll get a generation gap. Knowledge and experience about structured software testing will be lost.

Conclusion of the DTC.
If a new conference has >380 visitors, a dozen exhibitors, so much different presentations it was a real success. If you see all the comments that are given via Twitter with the hashtag #DTC10 I think we must organise it again for next year #DTC11.
But we must change in the Netherlands, we have to step out of our familiar group of people to share the thoughts an knowledge we have with the rest of the world.
The goal of this event was to share the knowledge with our customers, this is a point of attention for the next year, because I think we have to invite more customers, instead of only our Dutch test crowd.

The last graph comes from a very useful twitter statistic site TweetReach. This site gives an overview of the amount of people you reach with the last 50 tweets. As you can see is this very effective, the last 50 tweets reach 5337 people. This is free publicity, and done with little effort.

I’ll try to realise two improvements for the next year #DTC11:

• a Twitter Fountain in the exhibitors hall
• the possibility to ask questions at the speakers via Twitter at the end of the presentation

See you next year at the Dutch Testing Conference.

Post Scriptum,
There are some defects found during the day. Not every demo went well. But some ladies found also a defect at the toilets:

Photo by Rik Marselis.

Clouds are a hype nowadays  and at my company clouds are now an important piece of our IT puzzle. I’m working with a lot of smart colleagues on how we can use the cloud. My expertise there is the testing outlook on clouds. I’ve even written a blog post for my company about the use of cloud computing for testing. But can we go further with testing and clouds?

First I have to say that for me clouds are now still a buzz word online. Everybody speaks about it, but I don’t see that much about it. Last week I was attending a online presentation of Soasta about their performance test tool based on the cloud. I was impressed, but as I don’t know too much about tooling of performance testing, I’m maybe easily impressed.

It’s perhaps important to look at the cloud from two viewpoint. First there is Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is the infrastructure for development, testing and deployment that enables the real-time delivery of products, services, and solutions over the Internet. An example of cloud computing for testing is the use of the cloud for the testing environment. And there is Cloud Services. These are consumer and business products, services, and solutions that are delivered and consumes in real-time over the Internet.

I got this YouTube video of Simon Wardley from my manager about why cloud computing matters to IT.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=okqLxzWS5R4

But what does cloud computing offer? It gives you the sheer number of environments to perform all of your comprehensive testing. With cloud computing and virtualization, it’s possible to create multiple (testing) environments in the cloud. These environments can address multiple types of OS, browsers, settings, configurations, registries, languages, security settings and whatever more you want! These environments can therefore be used as testing and acceptance environments, so reducing the need for expensive environments that have to be setup internally and are only used when the testing team executes its ‘magic’.

Internal testing and acceptance environments should be permanently available for testing projects within your company. This creates a permanent press on your budget. Cloud environments can be enabled whenever needed. With this creating a cost reduction on your environment management.

All needed tooling and test scripts can be added in the cloud and be (re)used. Retesting can be done on those configurations that gave the defects. Cloud computing enables an immediate reuse of complicated test infrastructures!

This also is the case for users, not only testers. And even create their own personal environment in the cloud. This enables it for developers to create the application in the real configuration of the users. Developers won’t get bugged by defects that only happen in the user environment. Developers already tested against those configurations.

In these environments it’s also possible to create specialized settings so us testers can test applications from every available use and infrastructure. All the required tooling, data and test scripts can be added in the cloud and be (re)used with the sole purpose of thoroughly testing the system. It can also be approached from another cloud. The tooling can be a separate cloud!  It also gives us the opportunity to retest the defects that were found on those particular configurations where the defects were identified. Cloud computing enables an immediate reuse of complicated test infrastructures! And this reduces the complexity behind those environments because software can be added to it at will.

This is not only the case for testers, but also for users. They can create their own personal environment in the cloud. So this enables your developers to create applications in ‘look-a-like’ user configurations. Developers won’t get bugged by defects that only happen in the user environment, because they’ve already tested against those configurations. And this speeds up the testing. Fewer defects found during testing means not only cost reduction, but also faster time to market.

Cloud computing delivers the opportunity to have all the testing and acceptance environments we want – for a fraction of the cost of creating these configurations for real. And only a mouse click away!