Recently I was lucky enough to be part of talks at STPCon and at The Next Generation Testing conference. STPCon was in Addison, Texas and NGT is in London, England.
The first talk was with Adrian Rapan and was a mix of our different experiences on projects, in different environments and how we dealt with them and in some cases how we would now deal with them with a bit more experience under our belt.
It seemed well received and generated a lot of questions and I believe we were able to offer some suggestions to people who were in attendance on how to deal with some situations. I'm also pretty sure some people were expecting something different so while the majority seemed to walk away with something useful, others didn't, can't please everybody.
It was a hour and 15mins look which seemed to fly by and I liked that we could have a high level of audience participation, it was fun to be able to discuss issues and draw questions and suggestions from people.
It was also great to be able to meet a lot of people. Pete wrote some pretty good blog posts about STPCon and the people there so I'm not going to bother, also, I'm very lazy.
The second talk was about the project I am currently on and we talked about moving from Waterfall to agile and being 6 months into it. It was a team presentation and as such I presented with some of my colleagues; Richard Wadsworth and Andy Jutton. As becoming agile is very much about teamwork, communication and collaboration with all areas of development I thought it a good idea to include people who didn't specialise in testing. Richard is Release Manager and Andy is the Architect.
We discussed all aspects such as physical location of desk/team mates and moving everyone closer, attempting BDD and CI to name a few. We also talked about what worked for us and why as well as what didn't and why.
It was very much a discussion on the past and how things were, the present and how things are now and the future, what we wanted to continue improving on and what we wanted to try.
A lot of questions were asked and there was a lot of discussion after so it also seemed very well received.
I had a great time presenting both talks with some very talented and professional people who for some reason seem happy to spend time with me.
I do however probably need to plan a little bit better as I arrived back from Dallas on a Monday, went to work on Tuesday and presented at Next Generation Testing on Wednesday. This is not something I'm used to so it was a odd couple of days and I would totally do it again.
Thanks to STPCon for accepting us and Next Generation Testing for inviting me to talk and allowing us to attempt a 3 person presentation.
