At the end of FROSST 1, we asked participants to give us some feedback. Well... actually, we bribed them with a chance to win a Wii. As the content of the feedback had no bearing on one's chance at getting the Wii, I suspect most of the feedback is honest.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. You, the participants are the reason why it was a great conference. As I said Saturday evening, I am impressed with the testing community in Colorado. Instead of me telling you all about what I think was great about FROSST 1, here's what some of the participants had to say:

What did you like best about this conference?

• I feel much better about myself & career.
• The Goodie Bag was amazing.
• Relevant subjects.
  
• The diversity of people.
  
• The variety of ideas.
  
• The open space topic concept where we determined what the conference was about.
  
• The discussions in the groups flowed really well.
• Lots of interaction between participants.
  
• The format which allowed us to talk about what interested us the most.
  
• The level of knowledge.
• Talking to people that understood my language.
  
• Collaboration.
• Meeting lots of people that are professional testers.
• The price is right.
• Open space format
  
• We chose our topics.
  
• Having a chance to talk during sessions.
  
• Open forum.
• It was quite eye opening to see that other testers encounter the same issues with their companies and with different tools.
  
• Many different subjects to chose from.
• Topics discussed were those I wanted to discuss.
• Learning from experts on a subject I'm relatively clueless on.
• Small enough to get to know people easily.
  
• The ability to pick and choose the topics of interest.
  
• The best thing about this conference was the ability to speak freely and share ideas!
• Determining the topics ourselves.
• The ability to contribute & discuss. It felt like our conference -- very empowering!
• Lack of sales pitches.
• The discussions were all informative and helpful. Participation was easy and comfortable.
• Wonderful concept.
• The non-structured conversations allowed the topics to move in directions that were most beneficial to everyone in attendance.
• So many options.
• I liked how the conference allowed everyone to tap into the well of common knowledge.
  
• It's free!
• I enjoyed the open format where many perspectives were shared.
• Agile discussion.
• Lots of new ideas.
  
• Broad topics and narrow topics allowed for sweeping overviews as well as peeks into particular shop problems / current concerns.
• No long presentations.
• I had a great time meeting people and discussing software testing.
• The open space concept!
• The chance to interact.
• Being able to call a session I know nothing about.
  

Thank you to all who participated. We're definitely going to do this again.

While most of the things participants had to say were very positive, there was some negative feedback; and I've got to say that I agree with nearly all of it. This was our first time out and I believe we can fix the few problems next time.

We're working on plans for workshops, each focused on a single topic, to allow for in-depth discussion and problem solving that doesn't fit into an hour. Stay tuned for more information.

Until then, please share you notes and ideas on the FROSST Wiki and your blogs.

Here's what a few participants are saying:

• FROSST Conference Take-Aways by Eric Minick
• FROSST by Jeff Peters of XAware
• FROSST - Huge Success! by Test Common

Ben Simo

--
Posted By Ben Simo to FROSST at 10/16/2008 06:00:00 PM