I Joined PNSQC for a Free T-Shirt.
I Stayed for the Community.
In 2012, I heard about PNSQC. I hadn’t presented much at conferences and wanted the experience, so I submitted a paper. Luckily, they accepted me.
I got the t-shirt. And I met my paper reviewer, John Burley. We’re still in touch today.
After the conference, I agreed to volunteer. The deal was simple: spread the word about PNSQC. That was my promise in exchange for the shirt. I started posting about the conference on social media and, somewhere along the way, became the de facto social media chair. Then I was an invited speaker, and later invited onto the board. Then I became program chair. Now I’m president.
My friend Moss Drake has been around even longer. He has 15 to 20 PNSQC t-shirts, one from each year, and he wears them with pride. That’s what this conference does to people. It pulls them in and keeps them. Not because of prestige or polish, but because of something harder to name.
I’ve been thinking about that lately. About what it actually is.
I think about it when I think about poster papers. Because the person I was in 2012, nervous, not sure I belonged, hoping my paper was good enough, that’s exactly who this program is designed for. Not just students or first-timers. Anyone who has something worth saying and isn’t quite sure yet how to say it from a stage.
That’s what Poster papers are about.
We’ve had them for years. Some years four. Some years eight. We never pushed them hard. We never put them on the front page or sent a dedicated campaign or wrote about why they exist. They just kept happening, year after year, tucked into the evening networking session, a few people standing next to their work, talking to whoever stopped.
I started thinking recently about why that is. Why something so lightly promoted keeps coming back.
The answer, I think, is that poster papers solve a problem most conferences don’t admit they have.
Most conferences have traditionally offered one way in. You write an abstract and submit it. You get accepted, or you don’t. If you get in, you give a 45-minute PowerPoint presentation at a podium to a room full of people. Then questions. Then done.
But some of the most interesting thinking in software quality doesn’t arrive fully formed. It arrives as a hunch, an experiment, a failure worth understanding, a question that’s been nagging at a team for six months. It arrives in the middle of the work, not at the end.
Poster papers were built for that.
You don’t write a paper or do a formal PowerPoint presentation. You create a visual poster board presentation of an idea, an experiment, a lesson, or a question. You stand with it during the evening session. People stop. They ask things. You answer. The conversation goes somewhere neither of you expected, taking you and your ideas forward. That’s the whole point.
Here’s something I don’t say often enough.
PNSQC is one of the only practitioner software quality conferences in the world that does this.
Academic conferences have had poster sessions for decades. It’s standard practice in academia because researchers understand that knowledge is built incrementally, that half-formed ideas deserve airtime, and that the conversation around a poster is valuable in getting feedback on your ideas.
The practitioner and professional conference world has never followed. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe because it’s harder to put on a schedule. Maybe because nobody thought their audience wanted it.
We thought our audience wanted it. And we were right.
PNSQC is a nonprofit. We don’t have a commercial agenda shaping the program. Our peer-review process, which makes us the only peer-reviewed software quality conference in the United States, means we’re accountable to the quality of ideas, not how many people go to a sponsor’s booth. That independence is why we built something like poster papers and kept running it even when the numbers were small.
The poster papers enable PNSQC to push and pull content in both directions. Our peer-review process holds technical content to genuine academic scrutiny. That’s a high bar, and it’s intentional. But the same conference that publishes peer-reviewed proceedings also makes room for the experienced practitioner with an idea worth discussing, the student with a capstone project, the emerging speaker who wants to present to a few people before a room of 150, and the researcher with something incomplete but worth putting in front of a real audience. Both exist for the same reason: this community takes ideas seriously, wherever they come from and however complete they are.
The people who tend to find poster papers most useful are not one type. Some are experienced practitioners who did something interesting at work and have a lesson worth sharing, but no appetite for writing a formal paper. Some are explorers with a half-formed idea they want to road-test before committing to it. Some are emerging speakers who want to present to a few people at a time before standing in front of a room of 150. And some are students, with capstone projects or thesis research, or just a question they have been turning over that deserves a real audience. None of those is a lesser contribution. They are just different ones.
This year’s conference theme is Quality in the Age of Autonomy.
I’ve been thinking about what that phrase actually means for a community of people who spend their careers caring about whether software works. AI is changing the shape of work. Automation is handling more of the routine. What matters more now is judgment, interpretation, and the kind of exploratory thinking that doesn’t fit into a test case or a metrics dashboard.
That’s exactly what poster papers are for.
Not the finished result. The thinking in progress. The experiment you ran didn’t go the way you expected. The question you can’t answer yet, but can’t stop asking. The idea you want to put in front of people who will ask hard questions to make it better.
When the tools are getting faster, and the outputs are getting smoother, there’s something worth protecting about the messy human process of figuring things out together. A poster session is one of the few places in professional life where you can show up with something incomplete and have that be exactly the right thing to do.
I’ve watched a lot of poster sessions at PNSQC over the years. Some of the best conversations I’ve had at this conference have happened while standing next to someone’s poster board, a drink in hand, in deep discussion.
One presenter from a few years back told me their poster started as something they weren’t sure was worth sharing. The conversations at the session convinced them it was. The following year, they gave an invited talk based on what they’d learned from those twenty minutes next to an easel.
That’s what this program is for. That’s what this community is for.
I joined PNSQC for a free t-shirt. John Burley is still in my network. Moss is still collecting shirts. And I’m still here, trying to build the kind of conference that pulls people in and gives them a reason to stay.
That starts with making room for everyone who has something worth saying.