Friday afternoon, I attended another presentation on testing by a gal from Autodesk. The title was “Testing in a Creative Environment”. I expected something more about the difficulties and particularities related to the creative part. It ended being nothing more than the importance, the role of the QA team. It was a bit disappointing in that sense but still ok.

The next keynote was about formal methods, a dry subject. Add the worst case of hum I hum hum from the speaker, and you had half the audience asleep. Formal methods work for a very specific type of software when you need high reliability and zero defects. That was my impression before and it remains that way, and that’s what Connie Heitmeyer, the speaker, acknowledged.

A presentation from Dr. Peter Forbrig, from Rostock University in Germany, followed with “Model Based Development of Advanced User Interfaces”. His English was good, but still a bit hard to follow. He had some kind of UML application that allowed to generate UI and add patterns and get a simulation of the final UI. It seemed to go in all kinds of direction. There were some cool stuff but the project seemed to lack focus. I guess that’s what research is for.