Excelon 2013 Spring Announcements

[mheusser]

BIG NEWS

It has been an incredibly busy few months for me.

The first, biggest, 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

You can also stick around Madison for CAST, the conference for the
Association for Software Testing, which will be March 26-28; read
about CAST here - http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org/conference/cast-2013/.

OTHER 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 I have cooking at http://xndev.com/events/.

WRITINGS

If you can't get out of your chair to get to an event, I can always
bring Excelon to your inbox with an article or two. My biggest
publications since the last newsletter are probably "Taking the RISK:
Exploration over Documentation", an article in March's Better Software
- which you can find online here http://www.xndev.com/downloads/Taking_the_Risk.pdf

And also "How To Adjust to the Changing Face of Software Testing" in
CIO.com -

http://www.cio.com/article/730131/How_to_Adjust_to_the_Changing_Face_of_Software_Testing

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 lives on $16,000 per year. No
really; see the articles here - http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/unchartered-waters/

FINALLY

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 show up to http://www.nrgglobal.com/blog on the 19th and poke
around and try to find bugs, that's certainly allowed! Read more about
the competition at http://www.nrgglobal.com/general/update-one-month-to-test-competition

WORKING WITH EXCELON

I am currently filling up my Q3/Q4 2013 calendar. If you'd like to
work with Excelon, give me a shout. In the mean time, if you want
still more, I post every single article I publish to

Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/110804743960557196086/posts
And Twitter: @mheusser

And that really is it. Really. Thank you for keeping in touch.

regards,



--
Matthew Heusser,
Principal Consultant, Excelon Development
http://www.xndev.com