Call For Participation

Call For Participation

The Association for Software Testing is pleased to announce its seventh annual conference, CAST 2012, to be held July 16-18. CAST 2012 will be held in San Jose, California, in the busy heart of the Silicon Valley, at the Wyndham Hotel.

The theme of this year’s conference is “The Thinking Tester”: an exploration and celebration of on-the-job creativity and critical thinking in software testing.

Thinking testers question not only the product and its technical context, but the circumstances they find themselves in. What is the whole project context? What are the rules, the conventions, the unspoken assumptions? What are the constraints and risks?

Thinking testers challenge themselves and their team-mates to test effectively and efficiently with integrity and skill. Thinking testers neither blindly follow methodologies or standards, nor automatically reject them. They evaluate the merits of different approaches and adopt those best suited to a given problem set, according to their professional judgement. Thinking testers invent new solutions to old and new problems. They challenge apparent project or organizational constraints and devise clever workarounds for those they can’t change. They educate customers and teammates about the benefits of an open-minded approach to testing. Where necessary, thinking testers speak truth to power.

We want thinking testers to come to CAST 2012 and share their experiences. Join us and tell other testers how you applied creativity and critical thinking to hard testing, test management and/or project problems.

Topic Areas

Tester creativity and critical thinking can operate at many levels, from the smallest testing problem to the strategy and method for an entire test or project. The following non-exclusive list is meant to suggest (but not restrict) topic areas for proposals.

Exploring context	Developing strategies for testing (including data, environments, etc.)
Applying thinking tools to testing	Valuable lessons learned from testing projects
Determining test coverage	Collaborating or cooperating with others
Testing against expectations	Inventing or adapting methods/approaches
Applying knowledge of cognitive skills and biases to testing	Bending or breaking the rules
Managing or leading testing	Reporting on testing, possibly including metrics
Using automation in testing	Addressing ethical issues

 

Session Types and Lengths

• Emerging Topics (20 minutes, with at least 5 minutes for discussion)

Short presentations are ideal for topics in the early stages of exploration, and they also provide opportunities for less-experienced speakers. Other than the 20 minute timebox, there are no fixed expectations about format for these sessions. Emerging Topics session proposals have a later deadline than for other session types.

Proposal Submission and Review

We are using a Socialtext workspace to manage the CAST 2012 proposal process. Anyone who joins the CAST 2012 Socialtext group may submit one or more proposals, and will be able to revise proposals up to the submission deadline for a given session type.

The CAST 2012 Program Committee will review all proposals, and may provide comments online.

The workspace will be open for your peers to enter comments and expressions of interest (by voting) in proposed sessions. Anyone may register for the CAST 2012 Socialtext workspace and provide review feedback. Reviewers may comment and change their vote up to the submission deadline for a given session type.

The CAST 2012 Program Committee will select and schedule sessions, giving due consideration to peer review comments and votes.

The first step in the proposal process is to register for the Socialtext group. Please email CAST2012.proposals@gmail.com to initiate this. You will be sent an invitation to register with a link.

Important Dates

• November 21, 2011 – Proposal process open
• January 16, 2012 – Submission deadline for Regular Track and Workshop session proposals. Proposal and peer review process for these session types closed.
• February 1, 2012 – Notification of program acceptance or rejection for Regular Track and Workshop sessions.
• June 18, 2012 – Submission deadline for Emerging Topics session proposals. Proposal and peer review process closed.
• July 16-18, 2012 – Conference