#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

#ltgworkshops competition winner - Erik Hörömpöli'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. 

Erik Hörömpöli was one of the winners. Erik has a blog which you should check out.

I've replicated his blog post here.

I’m still pretty new to the scene of software testing conferences, only went to my first ones this year. I was so curious already, that I paid everything for myself just to go to the first #EuroTestConf and the #CopenhagenContext. Amazingly, my next conference was through winning a competition by Tony Bruce (http://dancedwiththesoftware.blogspot.hu/2016/01/london-tester-gathering-workshops.html).

By going to London I was in for a different kind of conferring. London Tester Gathering Workshop (https://skillsmatter.com/conferences/7219-london-tester-gathering-workshops-2016) is organized by Tony and his friends at Skills Matter and solely built upon hands-on workshops and discussions with practical exercises . Sounds great, huh? Not only sounds.

Skills Matter/Code Node venue fits very well for such an event, with easy orientation and different sized rooms. Before the sessions we raised our hands saying which sessions we want to go to and were distributed easily. And they have cool people as staff! I was approached by at least three of them during the two-day event asking about testing or feedback for the event/venue.

For the first day I choose Mark Winteringham’s full-day workshop about web services which I’ve worked previously only a bit before and my current team just created the first API for the part we are working on, so this tutorial couldn’t come at a better time. Mark started out with the basics, explains through his slides (http://mwtestconsultancy.co.uk/presentations/understanding_web_services/) what he thinks important to mention about web services (that you can think about it as a machine-to-machine communication), walked through his well thought-out exercise (he acts as a product owner for a booking site’s service), we practiced the main types of requests (post, get, put, delete), talked about context (we can try many things here, but what should we?), fired up Postman and Blurp and discussed it’s strengths and weaknesses (Postman doesn’t “save” your response, you need to send your request again – can be annoying if you want to remember or later compare two responses), learned about how to use cookies and saw Mark handling well his unreachable environment. Later in the afternoon we heard about why a service is restful and paired up for practicing modelling to aid our testing.

(ALL PHOTOS: HTTPS://SKILLSMATTER.COM/CONFERENCES/7219-LONDON-TESTER-GATHERING-WORKSHOPS-2016#PHOTOS)

Much of this is for later practice, as it happens often on a conference, being there is great to have the information or contact persons who you can go to (do I need to introduce the https://testersio.slack.com/? You can chat with Mark there among other smart and kind people), have the resources and the inspiration to learn, share and lead.

I already experienced before that the talks worth the least of your time on a conference. If nothing else, stay out on the hallway and talk to someone or play an educating game. This just got reinforced by attending workshop-type conferring. They give you the kind of knowledge you think you will get when you sign up for a talk and gets you into the working and professional mood as a lean coffee formatted session.

An even more romantic interlude: it can happen to you that you are afraid of such a workshop/conference, because you lack (or you think you lack, compare to others!) certain technical skills or you are shy, but I can only hope that you will do the first step to come out of that, because immediately at the second step you will see that the world-wide testing community is a very safe-to-fail zone and you share the same kind of problems, worries and wins with many.

Probably not the most interesting part of such posts are the chronological story of what happened on the workshops, so I’ll  try to save you from much more, but I really enjoyed Maria Kedemo’s testability workshop (which I was looking forward after her CAST talk on the very subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VR8naRfzK8), where we worked with two simple and powerful definitions (testing=gaining information, testability=how easy is something to test), fought over having the box that were handed to the teams (hence, availability is part of testability) and thanks to Stephan’s (https://twitter.com/S_2K) smart remark we realized we like to blame project circumstances more than ourselves when it comes to testability after we put our sticky notes with our pain points on them on Maria’s and Ben Kelly’s ever-evolving model (http://testjutsu.com/2016/06/dimensions-of-testability/ – by putting much of that on the Project and not on the Tester side). The day ended with an ultra-social session by Dan Ashby and Tony himself where we muscled ourselves through the possible definitions of coaching, mentoring and teaching (was there a fourth one?), practiced active listening and teamwork through games. We call them soft skills, but remember that they are harder to learn!

Here is a link (http://dancedwiththesoftware.blogspot.hu/2016/06/presentations-and-materials-from-london.html) to Tony’s post where you will find all the resources that has been shared by facilitators this year. This event almost made London look like a warm and welcoming place!

London #TesterGathering Workshops 2014 materials. #ltgworkshops

London #TesterGathering Workshops 2014 - Presentations and materials

Here are the some materials from the London #TesterGathering Workshops 2014.

Photos!

You can check out the full programme and podcosts here

The materials from 2013 are available here.

2015 is already on early bird sale. 

Exploratory Testing Session - Tony Bruce

Debugging, testing and hacking JavaScript Web Applications  Resources -  Carlos Ble and Jenny Mulholland


Testing Mobile Software - Stephen Janaway

Introduction to the WebDriver API - Richard Bradshaw
Java and C#

Making your WebDriver tests fast, portable and reliable - Mark Collin

Security Testing with OWASP ZAP: from zero to hero - Bill Matthews

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!

Change the way you attempt change - Skillsmatter skillscast

Recently I presented a talk on Change.

Change the way you attempt change

http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-scrum/change-the-way-you-attempt-change

We all have things we want to change, whether it's at work or personally and change is hard, in some cases seemingly impossible. This will be a chance for people to get together and discuss change.Looking at the psychology behind change. Focusing on case studies,research and personal experiences.
Looking at using the framework of 'Direct the rider, motivate the elephant, and shape the path' we'll discuss it's general use which we've all experienced and most likely not realised and look at how we can utilise it in our own lives.
Breaking down the framework we'll look at aspects such as :

• Finding the bright spots.
• Shrinking the change.
• Tweaking the environment.

What do you want to change? Let's get started

Here is a link to the Prezi

LTG Talk - Testing Without Testing - James Marcus Bach

James Marcus Bach spoke at the November London Tester Gathering which was sponsored by Test Partners Ltd and hosted by Skillsmatter.

Skillsmatter have podcast the talk.

I spoke at CukesUp!

Andrew Jutton and I spoke at CukesUp! 2012 about issues with 'rolling out' BDD.

Learning from mistakes with BDD

View more presentations from tonybruce.

Most if not all the other talks are also available.
Definitely worth checking out.

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.

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

A while back I decided that while there are plenty of great talks around at conferences, meetups, etc we need more practical stuff. I want to go somewhere and do stuff, test something, setup something, work with people on something. I imagine it's the same kind of thought that launched the Eurostar Test Labs

I am unbelievably lazy so I did nothing more than think about it. I thought I would borrow the TMF format and have 3 tracks running and people could just go and pick what they were interested in.

I was lucky enough to be able to attend Liz Keogh's Agile, Lean & BDD Course and I happened to mentioned my idea to Wendy who advised Skillsmatter would be happy to help out. I thought nothing more of it.

Wendy tells me she has created a page on the Skillsmatter site. A page! A actual real bona fide website page! What could I do? There was no going back now!

TBC