As I get time, I will be posting on the my impressions and take-aways of the presentations.

Paul was our facilitator for the weekend and did an outstanding job. He credits his wife for coming up with the colour coded comment system, but the devil is in the implementation I think. I believe it was Michael who said he didn’t want to do another session without Paul in his role.

Paul also presented a brief experience report to break up an agenda that was more theoretical / conceptual than experiential. The one note I took was that they use Excel to tap into their bug system and extract a list of bugs which are blocking progress. Those can then be weighted appropriately to remove the block. What struck me most though was the number of nodding heads in the room which makes me think that when we list off the skills a tester might consider learning we should be including Excel.

It amazes me how many people are unaware even the most basic features of Excel such as the ‘fill handle’ or that you can have multiple worksheets in a workbook. Take that percentage and remove the people that do not know graphing, pivot tables, named ranges and you have a much smaller cross section. While we’re whittling the Excel population lets remove those that cannot fill in data from a database and we’re down to I would guess maybe 1 in 50 or 60 users. And if that is too many, let’s add customization with vbscript to the filtration criteria (just for kicks).

Excel is, for better or worse, the most common method of presenting information to management regarding our testing progress and results. It is silly to artificially limit oneself by not becoming a guru at it.