Monday 22 April 2013

Reasons to be at Nxt Gen Testing

Program

  • Interesting case studies ranging from Mobile Testing to large organisations adapting their testing to their new agileness.
  • Me!
  • You can meet.
  • You can discuss.
  • Talkers with all kinds of different experiences and contexts.
  • Attendees from all over the world.
  • You can share.
  • You can learn.
  • You can teach.
  • I'll be there!
  • Interesting round tables ranging from testing in the cloud to the future of testing.
  • First time talkers as well as experienced talkers.
  • A good range of topics.

I went to Mile High Agile 2013 and I liked it.

I went to Mile High Agile 2013 and I had a interesting time.

The Keynote was from Joe Justice who spread the word about Team Wikispeed: building a 100 MPG car using Agile & Lean methods
You get the drift of the talk from the title, it was great to see how far they've come using these methods and also how they are able to help others using the methods.

The Keynote was filmed but I don't know what happens with the recording, whether or not it's put online for public viewing.

Find out more about wikispeed.

I managed to catch Paul Rayner's DDD Workshop which I enjoyed.  I think it gave a good introduction and a few take aways to think about.

We worked through a exercise and we were working out our domain model.  I won't write down too much detail as I don't want to give it all away.




Paul's was the only session I managed to catch as I spent a lot of the day in the coaches clinic.

The coaches clinic is a great idea and the basic setup is that people can drop by a booth and book in some time with a coach to talk about about pretty much anything agile related.

Whether it is issues they are experiencing or things they are unsure of and so on.

I enjoyed the clinic and it was interesting to talk with people who needed help with some different areas.  I hope I was able to help with some things to take away and think about.

Some of the things we discussed ranged from whether or not to use Scrum or Kanban to how to get more out of Product Owners. 

While I didn't make many of the conference talks I definitely feel my time was well spent.

My thanks to Pete Behrens for inviting me to be a part of the clinic.

My own talk was at the end of the day and it was still a pretty full room which I was surprised about purely because usually some people have left by the last talk.


My talk was about Change and the Prezi is available.

I caught a glimpse of the feed back forms and it was a mixed bag which is pretty good, in my experience it's hard to have a talk that is going to reach everybody the same way.


I do wish that the people who didn't get much out of talks would offer more feedback.  It seemed like the people who got something out of the talk offered comments and the people who didn't just marked down a score and left it at that.
That makes it very hard to improve.

All in all a good day, had a lot of different conversations, hopefully gave some people some things to think about in both the clinic and my talk and met a lot of really dedicated people.

My thanks to agile Denver and all the volunteers for bringing me along for the ride.


After the conference I got to meet Lisa Crispin's donkeys , Ernst and Chester.

Matt Barcomb was also Lisa's guest and it was great to be able to spend time with Matt, Lisa, Bob (Lisa's husband) and Lisa and Bob's extended animal family.

It was great to meet Matt and I'm looking forward to his (and Jim Holmes's) session at Eurostar.

My thanks to Lisa and Bob for inviting us (my wife and me) over. They are fantastic hosts and we had a great time.


 Matt and Lisa
My wife Marisol




London Tester Gathering - Tues 23rd April - The Shooting Star

The April London Tester Gathering will be on Tuesday 23rd April at The Shooting Star.


Guest host:
Sarndeep Nijjar
Address:
125-129 Middlesex St, London E1 7JF

The plan:
We have a room from 6:00pm onwards

Talks:
Lessons learnt from Load Testing the worlds 3rd largestSupermarket - Deri Jones
The Power of Positive Testing - 
Trish Khoo
Sponsorship:





Prize:
A ticket to the NxtGenTesting Conference.

RSVP

Hope to see you there.
Cheers and Kind Regards
Tony Bruce.

Monday 8 April 2013

Explaining testing: 101 Tactics For Revolutionaries

Here are the first 10 to get you started.

Onward to glory!

  1. if you’re in charge, do it yourself
  2. if you’re not in charge, do it yourself
  3. become known as “the guy who…” so when the time is right, everyone knows there’s a guy who…
  4. learn to be nice, so people like you
  5. realise there are no rules, you can do what you like
  6. know that you are as right as you can be for now given what you’ve learnt so far
  7. know that this is the same for everybody else
  8. stay on the inside of the wrong thing so you can speak with authority on why and how it is wrong
  9. know it’s not a race. That you can divide the world into those ahead of you and those behind, and to all those ahead of you, you’re the one behind.
  10. be an entrepreneur not a crusader
The rest are here: 101 Tactics For Revolutionaries