Let’s Test 2012 - time travel advice

If I had a time machine and could travel back in time to give myself some advice before attending Let’s Test 20212, it would be this:

- Go!
- Don’t worry too much about which session to attend. One of the most valuable sessions you will attend, you’ll choose because it has the least appealing abstract.
- Bring your running gear.
- If you ask Rikard Edgren nicely, he will give you a dead-tree version of his ‘Little Black Book on Test Design‘.
- Enjoy the food. Don’t worry, it’s not much of a challenge.
- Say something during open season.
- You have not been to Sweden, if you don’t know the meaning of ‘lagom’ and ‘fika’.
- Talk to people during meals, at the bar, whenever. You might just meet someone who tests some of the sytems in a Saab fighter plane. Or get to learn a thing or two about ice hockey. Who knows?
- When a speaker asks for volunteers, raise your hand. You get to do cool stuff then, like coaching another tester through Skype.
- Stay up until the small hours. There’s enough energy at the conference to get by with a few hours of sleep a night.
- Talk to Alan Richardson. He has interesting stuff to stay about mental processes in testing.
- When information overload hits you, go take a walk in the nature reserve.
- It is not possible to spend too much time at the test lab.

Note: Some of the stuff above I did do, some of it I didn’t. And no, I’m not telling you which is which.

This post was originally published here.