Quick feedback from Devoxx France 2013.
Favorite session was, no surprise, test related:
“tests, pourquoi, comment”
Valtech guys working on Mappy project made a broad presentation about the way they envision and perform their testing activities.

My take aways:

• automated tests are a form of specification that are always up to date. When you are not sure about the expected/actual behavior of your product, automated tests are a better fit than user manual (could be obsolete)
• testing activites can be gamified. Did not check yet : pair hero and TDGotchi
• set some timeout to your tests (easy and convenient in Robot Framework and TestNG)
• launch your tests in parallel. See this interesting presentation from TradeShift and their blog article about it.

Many things to try out !