The video of my presentation at the OOoCon2008 is live since some days. If you want to know more about the “The complex world of Quality Assurance on OOo” take a look at the video and the presentation file.

Thanks to Peter Junge and John McCreesh for releasing all videos of the conference.

I'm back in Germany from the OOoCon 2008 in Beijing, China. For me it was an amazing and interested conference. Not only because I found some new friends, I think. No, it was amazing, because some companies came to me and asked me, if I can help them to bring quality into their products which based on OOo. Wow, last year in Barcelona I was contacted only when somebody want to talk about code quality!

In my eyes quality is and will be more important for software products as in the past years. And I think, the QA community on OOo is doing a tremendous job!

At my presentation and the other presentations about Quality Assurance I mentioned in my last blog, there were round about 40-50 interested people in the meeting room. I was gladly surprised about this feedback.

For example in and after my presentation I was asked by people from IBM, how they can adapt Child Work Space (CWS) handling in their development process and how they can use the VCL TestTool for making general Quality Assurance on Lotus Symphony. In another discussion I was asked if the crash reporter tooling can be used also for other branded versions of OOo to get analyzed instabilities in their builds.

I also meet very often with employees by RedFlag 2000. They are also interested in changing their development process and how they can use the TestTool to bring in the needed quality in their products. The most interested number I have heard at the conference was for me, that RedFlag 2000 has 65 person for testing and QA. They aren't working all for OOo, but such a big QA department for software was a surprise to me. I hope I and the members of my team could give them useful tips and tricks.

It's the right time to work on quality for all of us, I think. Especially when other big companies are willing to contribute their changes to OOo and bring in QA resources to the QA project.

Beside the mass of interested discussions it was interested for me, that some guys are thinking the guys from QA are bad guys, aren't we? But ... perhaps sometimes I like to be the bad guy! - smile -

If you are interested in what's the complex world of QA on OOo is, here you can find my presentation file with many links in it and perhaps the video of my presentation will be on-line soon too. Then I will send the link in a comment to this blog.

Beside the business I could also say, that the trip to the conference was an impressive experience for me. The Chinese people I met and all members of the RedFlag 2000 and IBM team which organized the conference, were so friendly and open-hearted. Only the mass of the Chinese people in the streets were strange for me.

For example I do not want to drive car in Beijing. To drive taxi is like you are driving in a computer game. I never saw the “game over” but sometimes it was near that. In Germany every second it will crash thousand times in one street, when every driver cross the lines like a taxi driver in Beijing. So when you are in Beijing you have to take a taxi – which is very cheap for European measure – and you will find out, how it is possible to drive in totally chaos. But it works!

As pedestrian you are the fair game in the road traffic. Everybody is trying to overrun you! When you want to cross the road and your traffic light is green, the cars do not stop for you when they want to turn to one's right or left. Sometimes you find a crossing guard with a flag in his hand. But he only stops the cars, bicycles and other pedestrians when a foreigner like me try to cross the road. Then the Chinese people do not know, why they have to stop. So they do not stop or they are looking all on you. Nice feeling!

The food and meals I got were all very well and some were amazing – except the food in the canteen of the Peking University we got at the first conference day (only the banana I could eat). Also the culture to share all meals with everybody on the table assists to be more risky with the food. So I tried out nearly everything and sometime I do not want to know what is was. Only the chicken legs I didn't taste. And the best is to go out for food with some kindly Chinese people. So thank you Lihua and Meiying for ordering the soup without the chicken head and foots etc. I enjoyed our meal on Suturday.

Thanks to everybody for the successful OOoCon 2008 in Beijing.