PositionPaper

One could write a Position Paper by trying to answer the following questions:

• What's your experience with Designing and Testing Software?
• While applying Simple Design and Testing practices on your project, what challenges have/are you facing?
• What lessons have you learnt with regards to designing and testing software systems?
• What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference?
• How do you plan to contribute?

Note that the above questions are just pointers, you don't have to answer each one point by point.

If you feel you won't/don't want to answer some simple questions like this, then may be this conference is not for you.

I really appreciate people who can distill one of their many learning into a position paper. For example, a good position papers could be "Try to knockout before you consider to mock-out". Very insightful and can have good examples to prove the stand. Would love to see more thought provoking position papers like this.

A Position Paper is your Price-of-Admission:

We are looking for passionate and responsible individuals - Software Developers, Architects, Testers, QA, DBAs, etc. If you are actively involved in designing and testing software, please mark the date! The event is free, well almost - the cost of admission is merely this: your position paper.

Still want to know more?

Your position paper must include at least one Potential Topic you might be interested in hosting as a session. You don't have to be an expert in the topic, in fact you might not even have a clue about this topic, but you are interested in posing it as a question, exploring it. Questions make great session topics. Please note that these are potential topics, not final. If you want to start your conversation early, create a Potential Topics page for discussions about potential topics, but the final list will be "whatever happens" on the Saturday of the conference, when we collaborate to create an agenda.

The conference will be free. Your Position Paper (and, following that, your time, energy and passion) is the real investment you are making.

Note: All Position Papers will be public. This might help others decide whether this event interests them, or what they want to talk about.

Rationale for requesting position papers

What we've seen at various leading conferences like OOPSLA, AWTA (Austin Workshop on Test Automation), AAFTTVW (Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tool Visioning Workshop), Agile Coach Camp, etc is that having people write a position paper before coming to a conference leads to better discussion because people have thought about what they want from the conference. You don't spend half the time figuring out what you want to figure out.

Position papers are rarely rejected. If we are not happy with the position paper, we might ask the participant specific questions to help them come up with a better position paper.

Last year at the Simple Design and Testing Conference, we introduced the concept of position papers. The feedback from the participants was that it was a great idea and it really helped them come more prepared to the conference. Out of 82 position papers, we sadly had to reject 8 position papers (after giving them enough feedback and time). Basically they worked very well for us and we would like to continue using the same technique till we discover a better one.

You can look at position papers that were submitted last year: PositionPapersForFall2009, PositionPapersFor2008, PositionPapers.

A Position Paper makes an excellent springboard for a Lightning Talk, though you may choose to talk about something entirely different, too. See LightningTalks for a list of ways to approach a topic.