onsdag den 21. november 2012

Agile Testing Days - Day 2

Tuesday was the first day with the "normal conference" and my program looked like this:
  1. Keynote "Disciplined Agile Delivery: the foundation for scaling agile" with Scott W. Ambler
  2. Testing distributed projects with Hartwig Schwier
  3. The many flavours and toppings of exploratory testing with... me
  4. Keynote "myths about the Agile teting, De-bunked" with Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin
  5. An informal session with Gojko Adzic on impact mapping
  6. developers Exploratory Testing - raising the bare with Sigge Birgisson
  7. Keynote "self coaching" with Lasse Koskela
To be totally honest I can't tell you much about the first keynote, I ended up following twitter and the battle between unicorns and the real world (sorry.... Looooong story)

The presentation from Hartwig Schwier gave a good overview of many of the challenges you have when working with agile in a distributed project - maybe not so much new and lifechanging, but still a good presentation that collected the challenges we have when going agile in a distributed team when it comes to communication, timedifference, culture and technology. (and by the way, a good and structured presentation and a good illustrations to get to the point).

Number three I will leave to others to comment - I think it went okay, there was full house and great discussions and questions afterwards.

Number 4 - the keynote by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory was great. In an hour the two grand ladies of agile testing managed to de-bunk many of the myths about agile testing. Things like:
  1. testing is dead
  2. ATDD/SBE tests only confirm behavior
  3. Testers must be able to program
  4. Testers must be able to program
  5. Agile teams always deliver software faster
It was an engaged and fun keynote where they managed to kill these myths one at the time - well done.

Originally I had planned to go to an open space, but Gojko Adzic invited to an informal session where he would introduce the concept about impact mapping. Now this was an informal session - no presentation and stuff like that - but intersting conversations, and I LIKE IMPACT MAPPING - I need to learn more. The main thing is to move the focus from the what that business requires (e.g. what feature) to figuring out what VALUE it is they are trying to bring to the business, and then maybe find a shorter road to fulfil their need. Yet another book for the list of books I need to buy :-)

Picture shows Gojko while drawing a unicorn - actually it changed to a unipig during the talk :-)

I had talked a bit with Sigge during the speakers dinner on monday about exploratory testing, so of course I had to go and hear his presentation about developers during exploratory testing. It was great to hear his experiences, and I need to take a further look at his presentation to learn more about how they  implemented and uses session based exploratory testing. In a company where the number of testers are limited, it sounded like a really good idea - actually no matter how many testers there are it sounds like a great idea! get developers involved in testing on higher levels than unit testing, it will be a win-win, they know more about the application on system level, they know a bit more about what testing is all about and they help ensuring that testing doesn't always end up as the bottleneck.

Last activity of the day was the keynote from Lass about self coaching. It was a very different topic than the rest of a the day, but very intersting (and fun). He did an effort to make us understand how the brain works, how it reacts when we get negative input, how noise makes it harder for us to focus on the signals we receives... and makes it easier to take the wrong decision and byt that ending "in the box".

A general thing to take with me as a presenter after day number two is:
  1. Never make your presentation so filled with text that people focus on understanding that rather than listening to you
  2. Never put other people down in order for your self to look bigger
  3. Unicorns can get a very big place in the head of agile testers :-)
 



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