EuroSTAR 2010 took place during the coldest Copenhagen November in 140 years.
Being a program committee member it was a bit different, but not a lot; I met a lot of interesting people, spent too little time in the test lab, and listened to thought-worthy presentations (+ 11 Danish Alliance Lightning Talks.)

The theme was “Sharing the Passion”, and during the presentations there was also a lot of mentioning of collaboration, trust, that testing is difficult, and that people are most important.
I was at an excellent full day tutorial with energetic Rob Sabourin, that is so right in his notions of multiple information sources and diverse test ideas that are generated all the time, but specified in more detail ALAP – as late as possible.
I saw parts of Michael Bolton’s Test Framing tutorial, that had a lot of audience involvement and resulted in a lot of notes put on the walls – beautiful.

I will not do any summary of sessions, but I have some quotes you might like:
“when you make a mistake, think: that was exactly what I needed to know” (Bolton)
“I’m teaching them to write the requirements in Latin, to remove all ambiguity” (Sabourin)
“I wouldn’t put my child in the respirator unless it has been tested exploratory” (Rydberg)
How do you follow up “Right from Me”? -”We don’t. We trust people. We need leaders that trust people” (Nordström)
“MTBS – Managing Testing Based-on Sessions” (Feilberg, opposite-method in order to make it easy to sell SBTM to managers)
Weekend Testing: “freedom for the testers!” (Ajay)
“don’t assume your view is the only view” (Thomas)
How can testers help developers go faster? (inferred from Harty)
“I have nothing against CMM. It just doesn’t work.” (Gerrard)
“Use examples, metaphors and visualizations to improve effectiveness and efficiency in testing” (Zimmerer)
“the industry is broken” (Patti)
“always have two 30-seconds ‘commercials’ in your back pocket” (Galen)
“choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life” (Confucius)

I am passionate about testing. This passion gives me energy,  the fire that makes me what to excel and get better at testing. It is this passion that I share with my co-workers, customers and my employees, hopefully growing their interest in testing and sharing my visions and goals. I use it to paint my views on a better tomorrow in the testing community, as I see it.

Would this passion then make us more biased in our testing than someone dispassionate? I think not. Everyone is biased from time to time.

Passion is synonym with ardent, blazing, burning, dithyrambic, fervent, fervid, fiery, flaming, glowing, heated, hot-blooded, hotheaded, impassioned, perfervid, red-hot, scorching and torrid. Dispassionate can be seen as not showing, and not affected by emotion, bias, or prejudice. Would it even be possible to compare the two in a testing duel?

My CEO has told me that he want competent and honest people in his company. He says, “Imagine having competent and dishonest people, that would be terrible.” I like those traits, but I would also like to add passionate as a trait.

As a customer or employer, would you want a tester who is passionate or a tester who is dispassionate about their beliefs in testing? Isn’t it so that we are just passionate over different things, which naturally is ok?

When looking for personel in general it is common that we want passionate people who love their work. Most passionate testers that I read about are usually part of the context-driven movement. Can there be testers out there that are really passionate about how they work in the heavy scripted test environment, where someone else does the thinking, writes the script and then hands it over for execution? What personal goals do you have when doing these tasks? Is your main focus in moving out of that zone so you also can do the thinking, write the test script and pass it on?

In the ET heavy environment I tend to see fewer roles and career paths, is this true? There are test leads, test managers and testers. Everyone want to test since that is their passion, no? You have fewer administrators and more doers.

In the scripted test environment I see more different roles and career paths. There are experts in certain domains, writing test cases. There are many test leads who spend their time trying to lead what is to be tested and exactly how. There are test managers allocating the very few testers in executing these tests. There are more administrators and less doers. A few times I’ve seen almost 90% administrators and 10% testers. With administrator I mean someone who has little focus on actually doing any tests themselves, and in some cases do not want to. One common management idea is that anyone can assist with executing a test script. This means that anyone can be a testers, thus you are not special in being a tester and you are easily replaced. There is no skill in being a tester since you just follow that script, no?

Are you then passionate about being a script tester?