Dutch Testing Day - Naturalis Leiden

Currently I'm on my way to Madrid for Expo:QA and since I'm waiting for boarding, I finally have the time to blog about the Dutch Testing Day at Naturalis, Leiden on the 4th of November. Organized by Collis this time.

I went there much later then I expected; some issues at clientside occured which had to be solved first so I drove to Leiden rather late. In my mind I had the 'Corpus' as the hosting venue so I drove there. There was little parking space so I parked about a km away, walked there only to find that the Testing Day was at Naturalis. So walked back again (fighting my way through fierce winds of an autumn storm) and drove to Naturalis. There was the same parking problem there, so I parked at LUMC (hospital) and walked to the main entrance of Naturalis, only to find that I had to walk all the way back to the PestHuis where the event was held. At the door was a note with mobile numbers to call when I was to attend the Dutch Testing Day; and when I finally got in I felt I had just participated in a puzzle tour or something similar.

But I had a good lunch. I was surprised not to see any booths here from the sponsors, instead they were at a seperate hall behind the atrium where the tracks were held. I found this a bit dissapointing; a lunch is - for me- a perfect time to catch up with some vendors and competitors/ colleagues; by this setup I kinda missed this oppurtunity.

I missed the first couple of tracks. So my first track to attend was the one of Experiences with Formal Engineering: Model-based Specification, Implementation and Testing of a Software Bus by Marten Sijtema. I had forgotten the academic approach of the Dutch Testing Day and had to get used to the material for some minutes. But the track had some good points and some familiar info I had in a Dutch Testing Day (at Eindhoven) before. Next was the track of Panel questions to Model Based Testing Speakers (Jan, Neda, Axel & Marten), followed by - and this was a surprise- the track from Rik Marselis about End-to-end testing in the public domain, this one was supposed to be held in the morning so I thought I missed it, but instead I got to see it still. The last of the mid-day session was a track called "A comparison of free tools for Domain Specific Test Languages" by Martin Gijsen. I like this last one about the different tools. And I really like the setup of 1 track at a time; this way I don't have to choose which one to attend, which makes it easy :-)

The drinks were luckily at the vendor/ booth space. So I could catch up with some people and the buzz.

After the break there were two more tracks; well a track and a keynote. "The business case for Application Virtualization in testing complex distributed application architectures" by Edwin van Asch, was the first. Followed by Computer Security by Bart Jacobs, which I like a lot actually! After that there was the closing up of the event and there was a closing drink in the booth space.

I didn't attend the drinks afterward, since I was so awfully busy and had some other obligations to attend that evening. But I suppose they were ok since the whole entourage was very good.

I had a good event and heard some good stuff during the day. I found the venue a bit weird and not that well setup, but that's my point of view (and maybe the titles from the presentations where too long :-)). I liked the one-track-at-a-time setup (allthough I heard some people they would have liked a choice). The food was good (hot pastry and some good sandwiches!)
I will certainly attend next years Dutch Testing Day if possible at University of Twente (Enschede?).

Look for content on the tracks at : www.testdag.nl

So, now I'm about to board the plain to Madrid (I hope, since I don't see the actual plain yet...:-& ) and hope to keep you updated on my Expo:QA2010 adventure on this blog!