Integer != Natural number (night before NTD2012)

This is a blog post about my feeling on the night before the Nordic Testing Days 2012 conference.

I just came from the restaurant of Meriton Grand Conference & SPA Hotel. I was there chatting with Ainars Galvans, a Latvian tester that I met the first time today but has great ideas about testing, bugs and test management. We ended up talking about bugs and reporting them in a valuable way (by the way he’s going to do a track about bugs tomorrow here in the conference). He had a good example about interpretation of a specification. It went like this (sorry Ainars if I misinterpreted it somehow):

The testers were testing a random generator that had 2 input fields – “from” and “to” – and some basic GUI elements; buttons, checkboxes, whatnot. The application gave an output of random number between the numbers in the input fields. Simple enough. The number was supposed to be either integer or floating point (chosen with the checkbox). The application threw an error on negative numbers.

Isn’t integer allowed to be negative? I hope to hear more stories from him about bugs and specifications. That leads me to the agenda of today:

What is going to happen tomorrow and on Tuesday?

On Monday there’s the “How do we test at Skype” –keynote which I’m really looking forward to. With tens of millionsof users the quality of a product is very important. Sometimes even business critical. The other keynote for that day is the  "How to become a really great tester" which is also sounds pretty interesting. That is after all why I am here – to become a better tester.

I decided to choose 1 session that I really look forward, 1 that I never thought I would find interesting and 1 workshop. Obviously this strategy allows me to attend more than just those, but I believe that I will get my mind expanded by the tracks and workshops. I feel awful to miss Kari Kakkonen's track, but if there'll be a webcast, I'll check that out later. Also the Behaviour driven development and test automation with Cucumber -workshop would have been great, but I have to choose.

So here’s my list for Monday:
- Testing, saved by the end-users, by Maili Markvardt
- Care for quality, not for bugs! Do you know the difference?, by Ainars Galvans
- The anatomy of testing- ASA emergency room practices, by Kristjan Karmo
- Exploratory Testing – find you inner adventurer, by Sami Söderblom
- Non-functional testing on mobile devices –workshop, by Nikolai Pavlov

Caffeine + entusiast tester = Blogging at 1:00am

After the first day I will have my head full of juicy information about quality, testing and bugs! And guess what! There’s the other day also! How great is that?!?

So, now I got to get some sleep as I hiked through the city to find the hotel. I was exploratory… hmmm… exploring of the beautiful city of Tallinn. Note to self: No coffee after 10pm. But <enter adult beverage> is still allowed...