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.

Being a mentor is a big responsibility. It becomes a greater one when the person you're mentoring is set to become a mentor to someone else. What advice would you impart to your mentee? What do you wish you'd thought of when you were starting out as a mentor? Payson Hall distilled his experience into five principles.

People typically think of training classes as passive activities, where the instructor talks and the others listen. But experiential learning, where you learn through hands-on activities and then reflect on the experience, often gets the lesson to stick in people's brains better. Consider using interactive lessons.