I attended (and spoke) at the Optimization Summit put on by Optimost in San Francisco this week. After sitting through the presentations and talking to folks who attended, I came away believing that testing tools and techniques are getting better, but still not hitting the prime time. Ann Holland (Marketing Sherpa) gave a great presentation on survey results around testing roadblocks and the reality is that people like the idea of testing and want to test but are highly resource constrained. Marketing, creative, IT, etc. are all overloaded with things to do and try so that makes starting up a testing program difficult. In addition, the knowledge on what and how to test is still way behind where I thought it would be by now.

With that said, there is a lot of progress happening in the industry between improvements to tools (Optimost), new companies coming on line (WideMile) and better free or simple tools being widely available (Google Page Optimizer).

What is really required to get testing implemented within a company includes:
- A testing champion that believes in testing, can be the testing person and can sell the program internally.
- Buy-in from upper management to commit some resources. Starting out small and building up when results and the process are clear.
- A vision as to what should be tested and what will improve customer experience and results.
- A sense of data and measurement within the company. If your business is not data aware, then you need to tackle that hurdle first so that when the test results show improvement (or not) the organization can understand the implications. In other words, web analytics and testing go hand in hand.

All in all, it was a good event with interesting speakers and quality content.