Last week, I went to the Better Software Conference in Vegas.  I hate Vegas;  but that’s not what this is about, the title notwithstanding.

As many of my posts keep saying, I love going to conferences.  Conferences are breeding grounds for new ideas and critical conversations with people who are not already infected with the context of your current situation.  (You ever try to talk with someone about how you’re doing things, when they have been right there with you doing it the same way for just as long?  That conversation gets stale soon…)  So it follows, one down side to conferences is that there are so many people to talk to, and so many ideas, that you run out of time before you run out of conversation.

This was the first time I had been to the Better Software Conference;  and it’s content is slightly different than my norm, and it is far from where I live.  Because of that, most of the folks I normally see at conferences would not be there.  But this meant that I would have more time to spend with those who were.  One of those was Michael Bolton.

Now if you don’t know Michael, he is a very interesting person;  smart, very well read, and a deep philosopher of testing.  His insights can be keen, appropriately sharp and sarcastic, and always thought provoking…all good things, IMHO.  

So I went to see Michaels presentation, “First to Market or First to Fail”.  It was really an amazing presentation, covering much more territory than it’s name implies…and it made some wonderfully descriptive corollaries between technology and biology, and why things catch on and thrive (like the flu) and why they eventually don’t anymore (like smallpox).

Near the end of the presentation, we did an exercise where we considered a new and emerging technology, and made lists of how we think it might affect and change the balance of the status quo in the future.  The technology we all, as a class, chose, was the iPhone.  

As we talked during the afternoon, and over dinner, I related some of my personal biases on this particular issue.  As a father of two young daughters, I have watched amazed as the cell phone has radically changed the entire social landscape of teens in our culture.  While describing this to Michael, I made the comment “It’s absolutely viral!”…which, of course, brought the context of the conversation right back to the comparisons he had made in his presentation.

So for me, for Sirius SQA and TestExplorer, the question becomes “How do we become absolutely viral?”  As bad as it sounds, it is the equivalent of unbridled commercial success.  How do you mutate and adapt until you have become something that no one can do without.  That is the challenge for us.

If you have looked at TestExplorer, if you are a customer, if you just glanced at the website…we would love to hear from you.  Right here…publicly, freely…What caused you to develop an immunity or a resistance to our message and our products or services?  What would entice you and compel you to look again?  What would make it so good that you absolutely could not live without it?  Evolve or die…an age old lesson, and we are feeling rather evolutionary at the moment.

Sadly, Michael left the conference early, so I will have to bug him over the next few months as I go over his material from the conference proceedings and come up with new questions.  But I did find other new ideas to fill my time…that will be another blog for another day, though.

Until then, get your shots updated, and be careful as you approach that next newfangled piece of whiz bang technology…it could be contagious!!

Sincerely,

David