#LTGWorkshops. Got the right ticket?

Recently the Ministry of Testing announced the 'London Tester Gathering Workshops Join The Ministry of Testing Family'.

Exciting news.  The Ministry of Testing have many great testing events and a community focus.

We are looking forward to seeing what we can do together.

Unfortunately, this meant a de-partnering of #LTGWorkshops and Skills Matter.

Skills Matter are a great organisation with great events and a huge presence in the agile and software development community.

They were instrumental in getting the #LTGWorkshops up and running and I can't thank them enough.

We will continue working together on other events.

As the #LTGWorkshops transition happens there will be some confusion with tickets.

Any early bird tickets purchased for the London Tester Gathering Workshops through Skills Matter last year will be valid for the Skills Matter testing event only.

They will not be valid for the London Tester Gathering Workshops Ministry of Testing event.

Skillsmatter will be running a testing event in May.

The London Tester Gathering Workshop will take place in June.

Please check your tickets and confirm which organisation they are from so you can go to the right event. Or go to both.

If you have questions about your ticket please contact the organisation.

I apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Tony Bruce

Announce Exploratory Testing Workshop at #TestBash Netherlands

Test Bash is going to The Netherlands!!

Register here.

It's happening at the end of January 2017 in Utrecht.

There are workshops on the 26th and the conference day is on the 27th.

Along with Sharath Byregowda I will be running a workshop on the 26th.

Here are the details - 

Announce Exploratory Testing
by Sharath Byregowda & Tony Bruce

You know Exploratory Testing is not following a script. You know Exploratory Testing provides quick feedback. You know Exploratory Testing is a perfect fit to your context. You have notes from test sessions. What next? How do you share this information? What do you share? How do you produce metrics? What can you visualise? How can you visualise it? In this workshop Sharath and Tony will introduce you to a framework to help manage and report your testing sessions. This framework can be used to produce useful trends and metrics to quickly to share with your stakeholders.

• Through a day of discussions, teamwork and exercises we will
• Get familarised with the framework
• Look at different ways of producing your notes
• Produce trends and metrics from your test sessions
• Give an idea of coverage

Attendees will leave with:

• A understanding of different note taking methods
• A method of producing trends and metrics
• A view of coverage
• Visualisation of their Exploratory Testing

Get your place before they all sell out!!!

#ltgworkshops competition winner - Bhagya Perera's blog post

A short while ago there was a competition to win a ticket to #ltgworkshops 2016.

As part of the competition if you won you had to write a blog post about your #ltgworkshops experience. 

Bhagya Perera was one of the winners. Bhagya has a blog which you should check out.

I've replicated her blog post here.

I had a chance to join by LTGW in June 2016. I took my time in writing this blog because I wanted to see what I would remember after sometime. I normally blog as soon as I come out from a conference but this time I thought to wait and see.

LTGW is different to other conferences because it is only contain workshops. Many interesting workshops. Personally I had went through the list of workshops several times, made my mind, changed it, went through again, changed it to original and changed again. That probably explain how interesting the list of workshops were.

Tony’s (@tonybruce77) power of asking questions workshop was a highlight. Asking questions is easy but asking the right question is difficult. One of key point I remember is that we should ask questions not only for self-benefit but for the benefit of others as well.

Yes true. Many times, I have asked questions where they benefit me but sometimes I have asked questions to make sure the person who explains the situation had thought about them too. Many occasions I have seen people build up conversations based on the question I have asked. I have not thought that the conversations that build, ideas that triggered and areas that discovered are results of a simple question. Sometime your question can be the answer. It is always better to ask the question than being scared of it.

Then I went to another session on Mentoring by Tony and Dan (@DanAshby04). We had discussed about what is Mentoring, Coaching, Teaching and Leadership. In a summary,
Mentoring is about to grow others skills, Listening to others and share experience, provide continuous help on need basis, guiding, encouraging and help

Coaching is about transfer of skills, problem driven, not on going, maximise skills, and have an end goal

Teaching is a structured program, delivered one direction, share Information, inspire, and evolve

Leadership is about being responsible, Delegation, Representation, Accountable, Inspire, Motivate and Organise.

It was nice to see the difference of each sections as sometimes mentoring and coaching described in the same manner.

Both above workshops filled with interesting videos and fun exercises.

I was in two other sessions thinking I should have gone to a different workshop one workshop was too basic for me and the other one did not make any impact on me.

Other than that, it was a great.  Thanks Tony for the free ticket! It was an amazing experience.

Presentations and materials from the London Tester Gathering Workshops 2016

#ltgworkshops for 2016 have just passed.

There are some photos if you'd like to have a look.


And here are the presentations and materials:

Programme - 2016.

Hands-on Screen Reader Workshop
Steve Green

Testing web services
www.mwtestconsultancy.co.uk/presentations/understanding_web_services/

www.mwtestconsultancy.co.uk/presentations/what_makes_a_service_restful/

www.mwtestconsultancy.co.uk/presentations/observing_rest/

https://github.com/mwinteringham/restful-booker

Mark Winteringham

Dimensions of Testability
Maria Kedemo

Agile Exploratory Testing
Shared under this Creative Commons License

Agile Exploratory Testing van Jean-Paul Varwijk is in licentie gegeven volgens een Creative Commons Naamsvermelding-NietCommercieel-GeenAfgeleideWerken 4.0 Internationaal-licentie
Jean-Paul Varwijk

Better Check
Peter Houghton

Fast Feedback And Fun Using Ruby
Fast Feedback Using Ruby Book
Stephan Kämper

Questions are powerful. Learn to use them.
Tony Bruce

Get Into Coaching And Mentoring
Dan Ashby and Tony Bruce

Write more robust and extensible BDD tests faster with Serenity and the Journey/Screenplay Pattern
John Smart and Jan Molak

From Example Mapping to Serenity
Kishen Simbhoedatpanday and Arjan Blok

London Tester Gathering Workshops competition!

The London Tester Gathering Workshops are approaching and they are shaping up nicely.

To read a little bit about previous days have a look at these posts:

London Tester Gathering Workshops - Stephen Janaway
Lessons From The Black Ops Testing LTG Workshops! - Dan Ashby
Using games to aid tester creativity - John Stevenson
Focused Awareness - Simon Knight
Experiences of LTGW Workshops 2015 - Dan Ashby
LTGW2014: resources from our workshop - Carlos Ble
Announcement: Workshop & ebook: “Fast Feedback Using Ruby” - Stephan Kamper

Taking a page out of Richard's book I've decided to have a competition for 3 tickets to the Workshops.*

To enter you have to fill out the form:

• Explain why you want to attend.
• If there is a particular workshop you're interested in? And why?
• What do you think is missing from the Workshops?
• After the workshops write a blog post about the experience.

The form.

Not all the questions are mandatory.
* The competition is for a single ticket so there are 3 chances to win.
** Travel/accom. is not part of the competition. You will need to arrange and fund that yourself.
*** I have not needed to purchase these tickets as I organise the workshops.
**** Competition ends midnight on the 30th April.

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?

Presentations and materials from the London Tester Gathering Workshops 2015

Presentations and materials from the London Tester Gathering Workshops 2015

Stop talking about pairing and pair.
Tony Bruce and John Norris

Hooking Docker Into Selenium
Mastering Selenium Book will be available on Packt Publishing.
Mark Collin

Fast Feedback Loops & Fun with Ruby
Fast Feedback Using Ruby Book
Stephan Kämper

Visual Creativity: Using Sketchnotes and Mindmaps to aid your agile testing
Christina Ohanian and Dan Ashby

An introduction to performance testing with LoadRunner
Chris Lucas and John Howley

Understanding and testing RESTful Web services
Mark Winteringham

In-Depth Mobile Automation With Appium
Jonathan Lipps

Decapitating WebDriver for faster Automation
Alan Parkinson

London Tester Gathering Workshops 2014 - Exploratory Testing Session

Black Ops Testing 1 Day Workshop - 23rd January 2015.

Steve Green, James Lyndsay, Alan Richardson and I have been working on a workshop.

We held a trail run at the 2013 Tester Gathering Workshops London.
See this post for more details: Collected blog posts - #ltgw2013

We're going to be constantly working on the workshop and so it will differ each time we run it.

Register here.

Black Ops Testing Workshop, 23rd January 2015, London

Limited to 32 spaces!

This 1 day workshop will be an intensive event where we lead you through a series of exercises to help you explore different ways of approaching and thinking about your testing.

We, the Black Ops Testing Team, will put into practice all the lessons we learned from our mission at the London Tester Gathering in 2013.

We have joined together to bring our individual experience, knowledge and skill sets in order to bring this unique and variable workshop to you.

Each workshop will differ.

We believe this is a unique workshop for a number of reasons:

• 4 instructors - this gives you the chance to get 4 different opinions and 4 different perspectives.
• The instructors have varied backgrounds and each will bring different approaches and ways of thinking.
• Practicality is the name of the game. You will think, you will test, you will use tools (where it makes sense to use them), you will diagnose, you will report.
• We will share how we do things, such as sharing our testing sessions.
• Each workshop will differ as we focus on different techniques and approaches
• Every workshop takes a different application under test
• Prior to every workshop we will have tested the application

We will take a system and potentially looking at:

Investigating

• sharing tips about deeper observation e.g. using proxies
• discussing in-browser development tools
• different kinds and types of tools we use
• css tricks and tips
• how do we prep?
• keeping track of what you've done
• our different thought processess
• automation suitablity
  • pros
  • cons
• work on design
• work on strategy
• work on modelling

Diagnosing

• how deep do we diagnose?
• should we even try?
• how do we report what/how we diagnosed?

Reporting

• what for who
• how?

We will also-

• mock each other for not trying techniques
• discuss and compare different ways of keeping testing notes
  • sharing examples
  • experimenting with different methods
• where possible discuss examples we've come across in our work
• discuss and answer questions with four different perspectives
• give you the potential to improve your testing skills
• give you the potential improve your technical skills

Don't miss out on this unique workshop.

One more question... slides from #CAST2014 workshop

Questions are a powerful tool, and good questioning skills are extremely important for both people and in testing. Through effective use, we can engage in more effective learning, create outside-the-box thinking and start decision making conversations. Tony will explore the power of questions and their ability to make us and others think by looking at items such as the use of probing questions, tone and rephrasing. He will work through exercises to allow participants to practice some of what they are learning. 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. Questions can help create and negate, learn and teach, and stop and start projects, connections and relationships. Add this ability to your tool set.

Join the Black Ops Testing Webinar - 14th April

Our first Black Ops Testing webinar takes place on the 14th April.

We added a 'stealth mode' to our Newsletter signup on the front page of our website.

For our first webinar, we will debrief live with our thoughts on how we would test this, and work around this.

Using techniques and thought processes that we will cover in detail on our 2 day workshop, we will discuss the challenge of our 'Stealth mode' signup.

Expect us to:

• share tips about proxies 
• discuss in-browser development tools 
• css tricks and tips 
• mock each other for not trying techniques 
• deliberately say or do something wrong - 'live' 
• We plan to have fun for 30 minutes, and we hope to learn from each other.

Join us, and take part in the chat live.

If you take the stealth challenge before you attend then you can tell us what you found in the chat and we'll include you in the discussions.

Sign up for the webinar. It takes place on the Monday, the 14th of April, at 20:00 (GMT+01). If you register your interest and can't make it, then we may have a replay available.

I'm going to.....

So taking John's example I thought I'd share my plans for this year so far.

• I'm attending Test Bash 3 in Brighton in March.
• I'll be running a tutorial and giving a talk at Romanian Testing in May.
• Steve Green, Alan Richardson, James Lyndsay and I will be running Black Ops Testing in London in June. 
• I'll be running a workshop at CAST in New York in August.
• I'm organising (with Skillsmatter) and running a workshop at the Tester Gathering London Workshops in London in October.
• The London Tester Gathering will continue this year running roughly once a month.
• I am a judge for the Software Testing World Cup.

As far as I'm aware there are still tickets available for all but get in quick.

NB. Tickets not needed for the #TesterGathering

Collected blog posts - #ltgw2013

I've gathered up a list of blog posts related to the London #TesterGathering Workshops 2013.
I'll keep adding as I come across any but If I've missed any please let me know.

Pre:
Carlos Ble - London Tester Gathering Workshops

@webcowgirl - The Cheater's Guide to Levelling Up

Post:
Stephen Janaway - London Tester Gathering Workshops 2013

Simon Knight - Focussed Awareness

conferize - Attend any conference online.

R B's Prezi

Dan Ashby - Lessons from the Black Ops Testing LTG Workshop!

Photos from #ltgw2013

Pictures from the London #TesterGathering Workshops.


Skillsmatter photos - 

Google + 

Facebook 

Carlos Ble photos -

Google + 

A few photos I took

I attended an agile open space 2013 in Tenerife. #aos2013

Recently I attended an agile open space.

It was organised by agile Canarias and agile Spain and held in Tenerife at the CDTCA.

It started on Friday night and was held over Saturday and topped off with a party on Saturday night.

Friday was a good start, there was a bit of a explanation on what an open space was then people presented their ideas.

There was a wide range of topics such as pair programming to impact mapping to changing minds.

I don't speak Spanish and I must admit I felt a little out of place as the announcements and the like were in Spanish and although they were repeated in English initially, that soon stopped.

Not so odd if you consider you're in a Spanish country, little bit odd if you consider there was a push for more international attendees.

I think the push (and therefore the use of English) may have been news to some of the attendees though and it seemed like it may have also been news to some of the organisers.

I'm glad I went but I must admit at the time I felt awkward being there.  I was one of about 3-4 that aren't able to speak Spanish so I suppose it was awkward all around.

I attended a session on changing minds which was facilitated by Laura Morillo and a user story workshop facilitated by Juanma Gómez.

In the change session we discussed a number of things ranging from changing manual testers mindset to use (some) automation to how to change colleagues' minds to try new things.

In the user story workshop we talked about things like size of stories, what kind of details should be in them and different approaches.

Juanma in action

I was lucky to be able to run my own session which was on responsibility.  We talked about things like team vs personal responsibility, taking responsibility vs being told you're responsible and blame.

I enjoyed the session and I hope the attendees did too.

I met passionate people who are looking to help each other and improve.  Good times.

Here are some other blog posts about #aos2013:
http://www.carlosble.com/2013/06/agile-spain-o-espana-agil/
http://juanmagomez.wordpress.com/2013/06/23/reinventaos-2013/
http://www.adictosaltrabajo.com/tutoriales/tutoriales.php?pagina=aos2013

And here are some photos.

And here are some random photos I took of Tenerife.

Reasons to come to Agile Dev Practices

Program Overview

1. I'll be there.
2. Good mix of sessions.
3. Good mix of tutorials.
4. Good range of subjects.
5. Did I mention I'll be there?
6. Good range of workshops.
7. My colleague Ant will be there.
8. 25% off with code ATDC4P_025.
9. Potsdam/Berlin is great.
10. Markus can sign 'ATDD by Example: A Practical Guide to Acceptance Test-Driven Development' for you.  
11. You can talk to Gaspar Nagay, main contributor of the open-source .NET BDD tool, SpecFlow. 
12. Ellen can sign one of her books for you.
13. You can talk to Chris Matts and Olav Masssen.
14. Díaz & Hilterscheid have put on a great event.
15. You can talk to people who make software from all over the world, share your stories. 
16. You can teach.
17. You can learn. 

There are more reasons, what am I missing?

London Tester Gathering events for your calendar

London Tester Gathering dates for your calendar


London Tester Gathering - Weds 6th April - Shooting Star
Sponsor and guest: Michael Bolton
http://events.linkedin.com/London-Tester-Gathering-Weds-6th-April/pub/539524

London Tester Gathering - Thurs 5th May - Mozilla evening
Sponsor and guest: Mozilla Testers
http://events.linkedin.com/London-Tester-Gathering-Thurs-5th-May/pub/601378

London Tester Gathering 2 Days of Free Workshops
2 days of free workshops and talks.
Sign up here: http://skillsmatter.com/event/agile-testing/london-tester-gathering-2011
Programme here: http://bit.ly/fpF2nr
LI event here: http://events.linkedin.com/London-Tester-Gathering-2-Days-Workshops/pub/545939

London Tester Gathering - Tues 17th May - Shooting Star
http://events.linkedin.com/London-Tester-Gathering-Tues-17th-May/pub/587090

WTF? I've organised a testing conference. How'd that happen? Part 2.

So the next step is for your wife to tell you that you're actually on holiday on the date you've chosen.
Speak the Skillsmatter and set another date.
Decide that if you are going to do it it'll be free.
Start mentioning the workshops idea to people and ask around to see who is interested in running one. Utilise what you have available, Twitter, Linkedin, Meetup, your contacts, etc.
Start mentioning that sponsorship would be nice.
Expect a whole lot of none responses as you're asking for money and no (direct) money will be made from this and people will have to give up their own time.
Receive a whole lot of responses and realise that your original idea of 3 rooms running parallel is now blown out the window as you've heard a lot of really interesting workshop ideas and you:
a. Want to attend them all
b. Are quite sure a lot of other people will want to attend them.

Start 'advertising' the workshops.
Speak to Skillsmatter and hear the good news that there are more rooms available so you now have 5 rooms.
Start chasing up workshop descriptions - Start this as early as possible, it'll take longer than you think.