Align conference selection and business strategy

In most companies there is a budget to attend conferences, so we can work on how to apply the conference budget. But really if the company is true to the value of developing the company competences in software development and testing – you have to send people to the game changers (Lets Test, OreDev) and trend setters (Agile Testing Days, GOTO Aarhus).

EuroStar have some excellent templates for getting approval but for this exercise, let’s dig a little into the hard numbers. First up: align the conference attendance to the business goals and visions. I’ll pick some here as an example, and let me use them to compare  OreDev and GOTO. These are not as such testing conferences, but very useful as cases anyhow for these topics: 

• Better solutions faster
• Going mobile, Going Cloud
• Build in Business Value

A simple little trick when browsing the conference session titles: try searching for words “value”, “business”, “agile”. And a search for “value” in Goto turned up nil, until I reread “ǝnןɐʌ: Why we have it backwards” :-).

But there may be other criteria – people for instance, cost and timing.

	OreDev 2013	GOTO aarhus 2013
“Better solutions faster”Testing, Agile, Process, Delivery	Tracking and Improving Software Quality with Sonar Curiosity killed the cat, but what kills curiosity? The Beauty of Minimizing Effort Adopting Continuous Delivery Balancing ATDD, GUI Automation and Exploratory Testing Refactor your specs! Symbiotic relationships between testing and analytics	Track: When the Agile Manifesto isn’t enough (5)Track: Lean IT Enterprise (2) Why Agile doesn’t scale, and what you can do about it Do’s and don’ts for Distributed Scrum ǝnןɐʌ: Why we have it backwards JS Unit Testing Good Practices and Horrible Mistakes
Going mobile, Going Cloudmobile, cloud	Track: Mobile (16) Track: Cloud (10)	Track modern OS: 5 OpenShift Primer – Cloud development has never been easier Continuous Deployment and Automation on Distributed Cloud Environments Windows Azure Mobile Services What’s next for Mobile? Developing Java Applications for the Cloud, present and future Run your Java code on Cloud Foundry
Build in business valuebusiness, value	Value driven development Are Agile values universal?	ǝnןɐʌ: Why we have it backwards
	35	19

Disclaimer: GOTO Aarhus 2013 is sponsoring my attendance as a blogger.