Proposal Time

No, not that kind of proposal. It's the time of the year when proposals for several testing conferences are due. I'm waffling on whether to submit for STAR East this year since I was just at STAR West (currently, I'm leaning toware not submitting a propsal to STAR). Instead, I'm putting together a proposal for the Practical Softwate Quality and Testing conference. By "putting together", I mean, of course, that I'm taking way too much time debating topics. I've been working on an idea for over a year now on how the professional test discipline is moving from a test execution / quality control focus to a defect prevention / quality assurance role, but I haven't yet figured out how to sell it. Every conference seems to have a "Future of Testing" talk, but that's not exactly what I want to focus on. I want to hit more on the fact that testing is growing up...that in many circles, testing is no longer a second class engineering citizen, and that it requires as much training and knowledge as other software engineering disciplines.

Anyway...if I had it worked out I'm sure I'd be better able to explain it here. If I can put something together that makes sense, I'll submit and see what happens. If not, I may submit a metrics talk, or I may just decide that three days in Vegas in May isn't all it's cracked up to be.

For those interested in this sort of thing, the submission deadline for the Quality Assurance Institute annual Software Quality Assurance conference (in Orlando) is December 12.