I’m at STAR East in Orlando this week. (Tough duty, but someone has to do it!)

This year, STAR if offering something new: Testing Dialogues are facilitated sessions where professionals in the testing arena explore some of the challenges they face. There are two Dialogue sessions, facilitated by Johanna Rothman and yours truly (that would be me).

We did the first one yesterday, and it was ab fab.

Here are the topics discussed in the Testing Management Dialogue:

— Outsourcing

— Rationalizing job titles, descriptions, and work content

— Selling the value of creating writing down “just enough” documentation to convey important ideas to other people/groups

— Managing a struggling employee

The participants discussed these topics in small groups for half an hour and then gave a summary report to the entire group.

I was impressed with the energy and insights the participants brought to these topics. Johanna and I hope to post the report out results on Stickyminds.com so they are available to the participants…but we haven’t figured out the details of that yet.

In the meanwhile, if you want to read more about Managing a Struggling Employee (linked post updated in 2010), I wrote a piece on this topic for my newsletter a few months ago.