The video of my keynote is up on StickyMinds: "Large-scale Exploratory Testing: Let's Take a Tour."

A lot of Twittering occurred (I am told, I do not tweet and try to avoid twits at all costs) about the "god comment" I made during my keynote. Lest you fear for my immortal soul, allow me to give the quote in full context.

Some observant readers have noted that the promo video for my talk on exploratory testing (after the jump) only speaks about my work at Microsoft. As many of you know, I have moved to Google. I am happy to say that Google has made a great deal of progress on using tours to guide exploratory testing. So, I'll be reporting on both companies' progress. There's a twist with the Google work, though ... the tours haven't been used to guide manual testing, but as the way to design test automation.

More at the conference. See you there.

I am happy to announce that Exploratory Software Testing: Tips, Tricks, Tours and Techniques to Guide Test Design was published by Addison Wesley and came out in print this past week. I truly hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. It may sound trite, but I did enjoy writing this book very much, and at STARWEST I will tell the story of doing so. The book was conceived and partially executed while I was an architect at Microsoft, but it was completed and polished after I made the transition to Test Engineering Director at Google. At Microsoft it was aimed at late-cycle manual testing in pursuit of recall-class bugs. At Google it was spun backwards and aimed at a test design strategy to drive early-cycle automation. Indeed, this forced a last-minute title change for my book to replace the words Manual Testers with the words Test Design. I'll talk about Microsoft and Google's approaches in my keynote.

Personally, I thought a self-titled tutorial sounded a bit arrogant, but Lee Copeland talked me into it, and it seems to have attracted attention anyway. According to the hosts, it was the most attended session at something just above 50 people. Go figure. Lee was right, and I was wrong.