Giveaways from Agile Testing Days

In the delightful keynote “Insights from Happy Change Agents” from Fanny Pittack and Alex Schwarz, I learned a new way to share information with others. Rather than providing a recipe for success, or even a takeaway, we can offer “giveaways”. I shall offer you some giveaways that I received at Agile Testing Days.

Sunday I joined the PotsLightning session for the morning. PotsLightning is open to anyone, not only conference participants, and is a self-organizing sort of thing, a combination open space and lightning talks. Maik Nogens facilitated. My main giveaway was the diversity of conference participants. There were people from as far away as New Zealand and Saudi Arabia. There were several women. Participants had experience testing all kinds of software from tractors to music. My sketch notes show, rather illegibly, some of the topics we covered, such as embedded systems, guilds, and automation.

My next sketch note reminds me that someone – unfortunately now I don’t recall who it was – showed me how he uses mind maps for test reporting as well as planning. He embeds screenshots and screencasts, and uses the time machine feature of MindMeister to show progress. I love the visibility these practices add, and I’m keen to try it.

There was so much packed into the conference sessions, mealtime conversations, and hallway discussions. I even learned things in the vendor expo. Here are just a few of my favorite giveaways that stick in my mind, in no particular order.

• The leader of the mobile testing dojo asked if we had an app we’d like to use for the dojo. I suggested my team’s app, and the group agreed to try it. I got a lot of useful insights, not only into mobile testing techniques, but into how new users perceive our app! Lots of room for improvement in both!
• I’ve followed Bob Marshall (@flowchainsensei) on Twitter for awhile. His keynote gave me so much to think about. I need to work on my non-judgmental observation skills. Non-violent communication is critical and helps in so many of the problem areas currently getting in our way in the software business.
• Providing a “crash pad” to cushion failures, and re-thinking failures as simply “learning”. This came out of several sessions including Roman Pilcher, who showed climbers “bouldering” with a crash pad in case they fall.
• How to nurture testers? This came up in the tutorial Janet Gregory and I did, as well as in Lean Coffee. Janet held an Open Space on it, so I hope she will share what came out there. I think one way is to have fun, and you can see in the photo that testers had fun at the Carnival party during the conference!

  

• Lars Sjödahl did a nice consensus talk on how we don’t notice what we aren’t expecting. It’s a good reminder to me to use my peripheral vision and Spidey sense when exploring our software, and try to see what I’m not looking for. Dan Ashby’s session similarly reminded me to think laterally as well as critically.
• Janet and I find David Evan’s Pillars of Testing so important, we asked him to write it up and used that to wrap up our new book in the last chapter. I so appreciate his shout-out to the book and our many contributors in his keynote. Plus he always cracks me up while I’m learning something new. Do watch the video of his keynote (I don’t know when or where they’ll be posted).
• Antony Marcano’s “Don’t put me in a box” keynote is a reminder of how much we can learn from hearing others’ stories. For example, his story about how he had to work with programmers who were on the other side of a big atrium, and simply moved himself over to their side in order to collaborate and build relationships with them. Fanny and Alex emphasized that it’s all about relationships! Alan Richardson showed the power of short, crisp stories in his keynote. We can learn so much by sharing our experiences.
• Daniël Maslyn’s talk on robotics showed how exciting the future of testing really is. We tend to get a bit blasé, but that’s a whole exciting world we could enjoy learning about!

My previous post has a list of blogs from Agile Testing Days participants, please check those out for more!

In other news, we are honored that LingoSpot listed Agile Testing as one of the top 16 books every software engineer should read!