By James Whittaker

STAR West will feature something unprecedented this year: back-to-back tutorials by Googlers plus a keynote and track session.

The tutorials will be Monday October 3. I have the morning session on "How Google Tests Software" and my colleague Ankit Mehta has the afternoon session on "Testing Rich Internet AJAX-based Applications." You can spend the whole day in Google Test Land.

I highly recommend Ankit's tutorial. He is one of our top test managers and has spent years minding Gmail as it grew up from a simple cloud-based email system into the mass-scale, ubiquitous rich web app that it is today. Ankit now leads all testing efforts around our social offerings (which are already starting to appear). Anyone struggling to automate the testing of rich web apps will have plenty to absorb in his session. He's not spouting conjecture and generalities; he's speaking from the position of actual accomplishment. Bring a laptop.

Jason Arbon and Sebastian Schiavone are presenting a track talk on "Google's New Methodology for Risk Driven Testing" and will be demonstrating some of the latest tools coming out of Google Test Labs. Tools that were born of real need built to serve that need. I am expecting free samples! Jason was test lead for Chrome and Chrome OS before taking over Google Test Labs where incredibly clever code is woven into useful test tools. Sebastian is none other than my TPM (technical program manager) who is well known for taking my vague ideas about how things should be done and making them real.

Oh and the keynote, well that's me again, something about testing getting in the way of quality. I wrote this talk while I was in an especially melancholy mood about my place in the universe. It's a wake-up call to testers: the world is changing and your relevance is calling ... will you answer the call or ignore it and pretend that yesterday is still today?