by Tim Farley
The 2016 Call for Abstracts marked another successful effort, as more than 100 abstracts were submitted. This year, your program committee made a special effort to encourage submissions on several topic areas, and to deepen the pool of intermediate and advanced level submissions. The effort paid off, as Program Chair Tim Farley tells us in his report on the content received this year. As a special treat, the Batteries in Black Robotics team composed of area high school students will be back for another presentation.
“We have a fairly well balanced offering this year. About half the papers are targeted at the intermediate level, and the other half are pretty evenly split between beginning and advanced levels. Within each level, things are also pretty evenly split between the broad topics of Management, Development, and Testing/Quality Assurance. So, I’m feeling good about that.
“As far as topics go, we are seeing more interest in the people aspects of delivering quality products, including managing SDETs, organizing resources, and keeping teams motivated to deliver great products. We’re also seeing a lot more interest on the developer side in coding practices that can lead to higher quality products. This is refreshing! On the testing side, there is still a lot of interest in automation, agile, and CI/CD.
“We received another paper from the high school kids that do the robots. That was a really good presentation last year and I’m looking forward to their next one this year. It is focused again on AI/machine learning.”
