The Big, Big, BIG News!

It has been an incredibly busy few months for me.

The first, largest, and happiest announcement I have is that TestRetreat is finally a go – August 24th in Madison, Wisconsin, this one-day open-space event will be /the/ event to recharge your batteries, get to know the top of the field, and make your plans to change the world.

I do plan to schedule some events for Friday, but the intention is that if you live anywhere in the Midwest United States, you can get to TestRetreat by car. If your boss won’t pay, you can pay out of pocket, but you won’t have to. At $60 per person (and potentially, no time off work) this is the cheapest test event anywhere. Read all about it and register at:

http://testretreat.eventbrite.com

If you want to make the trip worth your while, (say you have to fly in), you might want to stick around Madison for CAST, the Conference for the Association for Software Testing, which will be August 26-28.

We’ve been working on TestRetreat behind the scenes for months.  Some people reading this know the twists, turns, and pains I’ve had to make this happen.  Please allow me to say I am incredibly excited to see this become a reality, and leave it at that.

And now on the ‘regular’ news.

MORE UPCOMING EVENTS

May 14, 2013, Quality Management Association of New York
May 15-17, 2013, Workshop On Performance and Reliability, Manhattan, NYC
June 20, 2013, Test Automation Day, Rotterdam, the Netherlands
August 5-9, 2013, Agile 2013, Nashville, TN, United States
August 24, 2013, TestRetreat, Madison, WI
August 26-28, 2013, CAST, Madison, WI

Read more about what we have cooking on the Excelon Events Page.

WRITINGS

If you can’t get out of your chair to get to an event, I can always bring screen inbox with an article or two. My biggest recent publications since are probably “Taking the RISK: Exploration over Documentation“, an article in the March Issue of Better Software Magazine, and  “How To Adjust to the Changing Face of Software Testing” in CIO.com.

I am also enjoying writing for IT Knowledge Exchange, mostly about technology careers. Lately I have been interviewing John Hunter about how he moved to Malaysia, where he can lives on $16,000 per year, which he can earn in about ten hours a week.

TEST COMPETITION

NRGGlobal asked me to host a free online test competition, which we are running April 19th. Registration is closed (boo) but if you want to read the blog on the 19th and poke around and try to find bugs, that’s certainly allowed! Read more about the competition on the blog.

WORKING WITH EXCELON

If you want still more, I post every single article I publish to google plus and twitter.  To make sure you keep in touch with what’s going on at Excelon, you can join the Email List; I promise to send less than six emails per year, to keep them short, and as relevant as this blog post.

In the mean time, I am currently filling up my Q3/Q4 2013 calendar. If you’d like to work with Excelon, give me a shout, I’ll be around.