Are regression packs still worthwhile?

Recently I was on forum and noticed the thread "Why do we do Regression testing?". In it the person was complaining about their company's regression pack and asking if it was worth the effort of fixing it?

My answer was a little quick off the mark. I replied saying "Definitely! Its the backbone for each and every build!". But then this got me thinking, How many testers out there DO NOT practice Agile development? How many testers DO NOT work in an environment where automation of tests is 2nd nature?

I do not ask this question in a malicious way, I genuinely would like to know. When I go to SIGiST there are a number of questions in the presentations/workshops by people who have not worked in an Agile environment and, to be honest, seem scared by it. These are the same people when you mention something like "Continuous Integration" and they get that deer-in-headlights look on their face.

This leads me to my next question; Is there a "Rich get richer, Poor get poorer" divide happening in testing? People in conferences mention that the lines between development and testing is blurring. It's called grey-box testing. But your average manual tester in a large non-software institution (Banks, Insurance Companies, etc) have got their "break" in testing by being seconded to the test team for a project and never wanted to leave their secondment. They may not have been given opportunities to learn how to program or may not even have heard about concepts like Agile, TDD and all the other new ways testers do their jobs.

To these people; the answer to my original question is still the same: "Yes! Definitely! Otherwise things that used to work may not work anymore. I would also suggest trying to automate the regression pack as much as possible so that you can concentrate on making testing more efficient. Try automate as much as possible so that you can concentrate on doing testing on those hard to test areas. Quality of software is still the main objective of testing."

Google Test Automation Conference 2008

I have just got back to work from my summer holidays to find a nice little gift waiting for me in my Inbox!

I have been given an invite to the Google Test Automation Conference(GTAC) in Seattle, USA! GTAC for those who don't know is the annual conference that Google hold. Its an invite only conference where people can just let their geekyness flow!

This year its being held in Seattle, USA. Last year it was held in New York and the year before that it was in London.

Below is a list of the presentations at the conference

Scheduled Presentations

* Atom Publishing Protocol, Testing a Server Implementation by David Calavera
* JInjector: a Coverage and End-To-End Testing Framework for J2ME and RIM by Julian Harty, Olivier Gaillard, and Michael Sama
* Advances in Automated Software Testing Technologies by Elfriede Dustin
* Taming the Beast: How to test an AJAX Application by Markus Clermont and John Thomas
* Automated Model-Based Testing of Web Applications by Oluwaseun Akinmade and Prof. Atif M Memon
* Boosting Your Testing Productivity with Groovy by Andres Almiray
* Practicing Testability in the Real World by Vishal Chowdhary
* The New Genomics: Software Development at Petabyte Scale by Matt Wood
* The Value of Small Tests by Christopher Semturs
* Deployment and Test Automation: Extending the Notion of 'Done' to 'System Tested on a Production Deployment' by Marc-Elian Begin

I am going to try my best to update my blog while I am there so people know how its going. If anyone reading my blog is going conference drop me an email so we can meet up and talk shop!