OPP2007: Test-a-Thon

Can you believe it? After a full day of different presentations on PL/SQL, people just couldn’t get enough of PL/SQL.
The 2 day Oracle PL/SQL Programming Conference (OPP2007) in San Francisco attracted about 300 programmers and DBA.
At the end of the first day, a Test-a-Thon was organized. Together with Steven Feuerstein and Patrick Barel, I joined the jury.

The Test-a-Thon is a contest where different testing tools would go head-to-head, even though most contestants used QCTO (Quest Code Tester for Oracle).

Contestants for the Test-a-Thon needed to bring their own laptop with a database installed on it together with the testing tool of choice.

Some used UtPLSQL, others used the Built-in Testing functionality that PL/SQL Developer provides. I don’t think anyone used a home-grown tool to perform the tests.
The tests to be performed were specified ahead of time, some of them were pretty straight forward others were simply hard to do. Not too long ago
I wrote about one of the tests that needed to be performed, but we changed it a little bit.
Everybody had an hour to complete as much of the tests as possible. While everyone else was having drinks, the contestants were working very hard.
After an hour, there were actually five of the thirty five contestants that finished the four basic tests. Each of these tests consisted of three or four individual tests to be performed. Of course there could only be one winner. Filipe Silva from Porto, Portugal was the one who completed the most execercises including part of the bonus-excercises. He used QCTO to participate in the Test-a-Thon and what really amazed me is that it was his first time using the tool (or so he said ;-)).

All the contestant got a T-Shirt with this logo on the back.

… did I already mentioned that I suggested the slogan for the shirt?