With a week full of sessions, tutorials, training classes, and events, the STARWEST software testing conference had plenty of takeaways useful for your professional and personal life. Here are four lessons distilled from the conference’s keynote presentations on testing, communication, and directing your career.

The MVP brings tremendous value to a team’s ability to effectively implement agile practices. It also allows us to better understand what “value” actually means to our users and how context changes the meaning. Your MVP must move through your validation and release cycles while still being valuable to your users.

Many testing organizations have bugs sitting in their bug-tracking tool gathering dust. The issues aren't high-priority enough to fix immediately, but no one wants to close them because they might get around to fixing them eventually. This is a hoarder mentality! You need to organize and declutter your bug backlog.