Last week found me braving the Grand Rapids, Michigan summer (heat! humidity! sun! loved it!) to attend my first CAST. While I propped it a couple years ago, I didn't actually make it until now.

The short version: CAST is awesome, conference proceedings will soon be up at http://www.cast2010.org so you can see what you missed, you should go next year!

Longer version: Monday I participated in an all-day tutorial by Fiona Charles on Speaking Truth to Power. Most of this session involved role playing scenarios about telling an unwelcome message to people in power. Some came from our real lives, others were invented; all came scarily close to real situations we had suffered through at some point.

I found this session the most helpful of any I attended. We could halt the role play whenever we desired and discuss what had happened so far, then continue on or replay it from the beginning. This let us experiment with different approaches and see how they affected a scenario's outcome. Highly valuable!

I had three big learnings that day:

• "Let me get back to you on that" is helpful in a multitude of situations.
• Our emotions will hijack us when we least expect them to.
• Changing the physical relationship between the people in a conversation will change the conversation.

Each of the next two days started off with a keynote and then continued with a full day of sessions. While one speaker turned me off when he seemed to make fun of waterfall ("Look at how long it takes!"), it turned out OK; every other session was quite good.

While the talks were interesting, the best part of every session was the facilitated conversations at their end. At least a third of every session was devoted to these discussions, and the CAST staff ensured that even the shyest introvert had a chance to talk without being steamrolled by the decidedly non-shy extroverts who always seem to dominate Q&A periods.

Extrapolating from this you might guess that pretty much everybody talked with pretty much everybody else throughout the conference, and you would pretty much be correct. Before sessions, after sessions, and into the wee hours of the night I had any number of conversations to choose from, and I took full advantage of these opportunities to meet new people, chat in person with people I had only met online, and renew friendships with people I already knew. For a person like me who loves to talk with people about testing, this was nirvana!

So, like I said earlier, CAST was awesome, conference proceedings will soon be up at http://www.cast2010.org, and you should definitely go next year! It'll be in Seattle, and I will definitely be there!

We have a set of clocks counting down the time until our next big milestone, one where all the testers are, one by the devs, and one by PM. I just noticed that they tell a story:

1. PM reaches the end of the milestone first;
2. Dev reaches it next;
3. And Test reaches it last

Isn't that how it always seems to be when it comes to software development?

I'm on Twitter now; @humbugreality if you're interested. No promises whether I'll post there more frequently than I am currently doing here; so far I've twittered two jokes and am wondering what to say next.

Judging from the tweets I've seen, Twitter seems to be a combination Facebook + instant messaging tool where friending someone isn't necessary before you can see their updates; I don't see the point in that yet.

The main reason I haven't been blogging is that I'm not sure what I want to say. One thing I learned in my recent job search is that the act of testing no longer excites me - I'd much rather spend my time helping people it does excite do their job. And to answer the obvious question: I still don't want to be a manager. All of which makes my current role of Toolsmith (which inevitably involves much process-smithing) a fit while I figure out what I *really* want to be doing with my life now. (Which may turn out to be exactly what I'm already doing...)

Binging my way through the TED podcasts is helping me decide what I want to do with my life; at least, many of the talks feel important to me in a way I haven't yet put my finger on. More details when I have 'em.

As I've mentioned previously, my primary task right now is building a new automation stack for my team (~60 testers; all of Windows Phone Test eventually I'm hoping). While my thinking has evolved somewhat since I last blogged heavily about automation stack design, my first version here looked pretty similar. The more I learn about my team and their problems, however, and the more I realize that  many of the reasons I'd previously done things in particular ways no longer apply (e.g., a lack of good model-based testing tools), the more my design here changes. It's becoming simpler, mostly, which I take as a positive sign. Once my design settles down I'll post more details about the process and end result.

In the meantime, know that I'm busy writing lots of code and standards and guidelines in hopes of helping my team do their job better!

Last fall Jerry Weinberg sent me a review copy of his scifi novel Mistress of Molecules. I pretty much read it straight through, and then didn't blog for six months so never posted my review. So here goes:

I enjoyed it! Although I guessed the major plot points and some of the details well ahead of their occurrence, I always felt like "Hah! I *knew* that was going to happen!" rather than "Well, duh - what else would have happened?" And I was surprised by other details, including the manner in which what I guessed would happen actually did.

Jerry says he switched from non-fiction to fiction in hopes of finding a wider audience for his ideas and teachings. While I don't know how he's doing reach-wise, I clearly see his teachings in the puzzles I saw everywhere as well as the situations in which he put his characters. As Jerry helps Libra and Andre deal with their various life and work problems, realize (some of) what is really going on, and discover new ways to resolve their predicaments, I see clear parallels to his non-fiction books, PSL workshop, and AYE conference. I wish he'd been writing fiction when I was a teenager! Young adults feeling like square pegs being stuffed into round holes struck home for me, and I like to think his teachings would have seeped into my brain and helped me deal with high school and college a little better! As I know is happening for me as I read his books now.

As for those puzzles I mentioned, every character and place name, as well as every sequence of numbers, had me puzzling out its significance. Sometimes this pulled me out of the story, and while I *think* I know the answer for some cases others still have me stumped. Jerry?

What I love most about the best science fiction is that it can be read on (at least) two levels: the surface story, and the underlying manifesto. Mistress of Molecules fulfills that definition of science fiction in spades. Recommended.