… And who doesn’t like prizes?!
This was my first time at STARWEST, and the thing that struck me the most was the passion and energy of the attendees. Software testers really are a passionate bunch.
I stopped in on a number of the presentations, and the presenters exhibited a passion for their topics. Paul Gerrard spoke on Testing the Internet of Everything, Janet Gregory certainly didn’t want to talk about bugs in her presentation titled I Don’t Want to Talk About Bugs: Let’s Change the Conversation, and of course we can’t forget our own (exceptionally passionate) Pamela Gillaspie’s talk Improve Testing with a Zone Defense.
At lunch on Wednesday, I asked the woman sitting next to me how she got into testing. She told me a story about how when she was a child, she loved easter egg hunts for the thrill of finding the treasure so much, that she would ask her parents to hide hard boiled eggs over and over, just so that she could hunt for them again. She feels that for her, the joy of finding treasure carries over into software testing (and is it my poor memory, or did she also say that she had previously studied anthropology?).
It seems to me that this joy of hunting for ‘treasure’ is not uncommon among the testing community. The exhilaration of finding a bug in an application (while not something you necessarily want to find), is a sought-after feeling.
Maybe this is why Spencer Shandonay from Liberty Mutual was so excited when he won the TestPlant prize in the passport game…
Spencer Shandonay – winner of the TestPlant passport prize at STARWEST – poses with Elizabeth Simons of TestPlant, holding his prize.
… Or, maybe it was just because (as he said to me afterwards), that he was especially excited about our prize: a $250 gift card to REI, a national parks pass for the year, as well as a TestPlant t-shirt, power-pack USB charger, and other goodies.
Either way, congratulations to Spencer, and thank you to STARWEST for such a great event!
Elizabeth Simons is a Product Marketing Executive at TestPlant. Formerly a part of the Technical Support and Documentation teams here at the company, she’s been working with eggPlant test automation tools for the past 4 years. Elizabeth also loves to paint with watercolors, and designs repeat patterns for fabric and wallpaper.