London Tester Gathering Workshops 2016 - Call for thoughts

The London Tester Gathering Workshops bring together some of the greatest minds in our industry, to learn, share and evolve the tool and techniques that matter to you! A joining of 100+ testers, #LTGWorkshops creates an unrivalled space for meeting fellow testers facing the same engineering problems. At the centre of the conference is a tried-and-true design with a focus on giving you the advantages you won't find in the manual!

Join us at #LTGWorkshops on the 2-3rd of June 2016! Come along to discover and learn good ideas and techniques in testing. At the end of these two days, you will know how to use modern testing practices and provide the information your stakeholders need to make informed decisions.

WARNING - This is not your event if you want to sit and listen. This is your event if you want to discuss, learn, share and do.

Call for Thoughts (CfT)

All Skills Matter’s conferences are crafted with the community in mind; for people who are passionate about discovering and learning innovative approaches and technologies to crack the engineering challenges in our industry. People like you!

We hope you can help us organise a valuable event that helps you discover and explore those ideas, technologies and practices you need, featuring the experts you want to learn from and formats that best suit you, by sharing your ideas in this Call for Thoughts.

Are you coming to Agile Testing Days 2015? Will a 15% discount code help?

Want to come to Agile Testing Days 2015? Will a 15% discount code help?

“Embracing Agile for a Competitive Edge - Establish leadership by delivering early, rapid & iterative application releases” is the Motto of this Year’s Agile Testing Days. We proudly present the 7th edition of Europe’s greatest agile event of the year!

Check out the program here.

Check out last year's.


15% Speaker Discount Code: TonBru_015
The code is combinable with other speaker codes!!

Questions are powerful. Learn to use them workshop - 22nd October

At agile tour London I'll be giving a 1 day workshop focused around questions.

Here's the abstract:

Questions are a powerful tool, and good questioning skills are extremely important for both people in teams. Through effective use, we can

• Save ourselves time and effort.
• Encourage participation and teamwork.
• Create outside-the-box thinking.
• Engage in more effective learning.
• Start decision making conversations.
• Improve our inquiry skills.

During this practical interactive session we will explore the power of questions and their ability to make us and others think by looking at items such as:

• Listening to set the questions.
• Use of probing questions.
• Open and closed questions.
• Constructive conversations
• Tone.
• Rephrasing..

We will do this with exercises and evaluating as we go.
Questions can help create and negate, learn and teach, and stop and start projects, connections and relationships. Participants will walk away with ideas on how to sharpen their questioning skills to a fine tool which can be used to transform their every conversation and to increase their testing thinking.
I use open questions daily to gather more information, open questions give people no other choice but to churn things over in their head before they respond.
I also use open questions when I pair (with developers) as it helps them defocus for a minute while they answer me and helps them realise what is going wrong as their sub-conscious churns away. I have tone questions used on me, tone can have a huge impact, a one word question and change of tone can change anything. For example, the question with the right tone for 'Really?'. My wife uses it daily to devastating effect, I immediately stop whatever I'm doing.
Questions are used to help my preparation. I question myself with:

• What is my awareness?
• What is my intent?
• What is my motion?

I have to step outside my interpretation with questions so as to not get trapped by asking myself things like 'What happened to make me interpret it this way?