A strong, active, local testing community is a wonderful thing. Kitchener-Waterloo, a hub of software and software-related companies small and large, has such a community, and an active association in the KWSQA. Each year, the KWSQA presents the Targeting Quality conference, which I’ve had the pleasure of participating in for a few years. Alas, this year I can’t make it—but maybe you can. This year’s presenters and workshop leaders are Henrik Andersson, Paul Carvalho, Fiona Charles, Selena Delesie, Adam Goucher, John Hazel, Paul Holland, Griffin Jones, Jason Little, Kevin Malley, Neil Price-Jones, and Declan Whelan. The conference happens April 23-24 in Waterloo, Ontario—within easy reach of Toronto.
A strong, active, national testing community is also a wonderful thing. Sweden, for example, is a hotbed of committed, energetic, and thoughtful testers, who this year inaugurate the Let’s Test conference which runs May 7-9 in Stockholm, Sweden. While the founding community is local, the scope is global, with a slate of speakers and tutorial presenters coming from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Germany (dang—broke the alphabetic run; where are the French?), Japan, the Netherlands, Romania, South Africa, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I’m honoured to be giving a keynote and a half-day tutorial at Let’s Test. Each session’s timeslot consists of 2/3 presentation and 1/3 facilitated discussion, clearly inspired by the CAST protocol.
And speaking of CAST… A strong, active, worldwide testing community is a wonderful thing too. This year, the Conference for the Association for Software Testing (CAST 2012) will be held July 16-18 in San Jose, CA. I’ll be there for that one too. Doug Hoffman (conference chair) and Fiona Charles (program chair, along with Anne-Marie Charrett, Sherry Heinze, Johan Jonasson on the program committee, plus Matt Heusser and Pete Walen managing the Emerging Topics track) have put together a terrific agenda. There are too many compelling speakers, sessions, and workshops to list here, but have a look at the program yourself.