Broccoli man

 

The Three Amigos Infographic

My first attempt at an infographic.
I used easel.ly.

Feedback welcome.

#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.

#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!

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.

A BDD lesson from my past - Part One

So, a few years ago I was involved in an agile transformation.

I was part of the consultancy brought in to work with a client.

As part of our learning through trial and error, we decided to try Behaviour Driven Development.

I wanted to learn from what we went through and share it with others.

I also wanted to learn what some of the people on the client site learned.

I worked with two separate people and we came up with 2 talks.

We worked with the same theme but taking their different experiences and personalities we created different talks.

It worked quite well.

Thanks to @andrewjutton and @brightoniant for joining me on this exercise and also being willing to go through their first presentation experience with me.

Recently @friendlytester wrote a post which reminded me of that time.

His post prompted me to write this post.

Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then we'll begin.

Many moons ago, a few people came across SpecFlow and this lead them to Behaviour Driven Development.

We didn't spend time thinking through exactly what we wanted to achieve, or how we'd know if we were getting there.

SpecFlow, however, was shiny and new and we were still working on how exactly we were going to use automation in testing. 

We were lucky that people with the business knowledge were available.

We were unlucky in that the people with business knowledge were offsite most of the time.

We decided to trial BDD, which was driven by the tool and by the 'Software makers', which at the time did not include anybody from the business.

This (now) seems wrong and didn't work as effectively as it could have.

I have no evidence to back this up, but I believe that having the business suggest the idea of BDD would change the approach completely. 

BDD is about focusing on collaboration, not focusing on a tool.

You can work with BDD without ever using automation and receive plenty of value.

In-some cases you'll be better off as you won't get lost in the tool and focus on the collaboration.

Collaboration is the key and point.

So, there we were; Giving it, Whening it and Thening like mad.

Mostly written (solely) by the Business Analysts and therefore bypassing a shared understanding and attempting to share one person's understanding.

Here's an example:

Scenario: Display ‘Insurer Selection’ screen

Given that Insurer selection screen has been invoked
When the Insurer selection UI is rendered
Then the ‘Insurer Selection’ page is displayed
And the ‘Risk Variation Name’ field is displayed
And the ‘Risk Variation Name’ field is selected
And the ‘Customer Name’ is displayed
And only breadcrumb ‘Select Insurer’ is displayed
And all insurers setup in the system for the policy type are displayed
And all insurers setup in the system for the policy type are not selected
And the ‘Next’ button is disabled

We were learning.

We hadn't quite grasped yet that the how wasn't important, it's the what that is important.

What is actually trying to be completed?

End of part one.

Blast from the past: BDD Lessons Learned

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

How the London #TesterGathering sponsorship works

In order to save constantly repeating myself here is how the London #TesterGathering works.

If you want to sponsor it is a minimum of £600 (+VAT). You can however put in whatever amount you like (or top it up on the night).
You can either be invoiced or place a card behind the bar.
This goes to the venue hire. This may vary, it will be dependent on the venue cost.

If there are two willing sponsors there may be events with joint sponsorship, the amount is the same for both sponsors and it all goes behind the bar.

For this you will have:

• access to a room of eager to listen people who work in software development, most of them will be Testers.

Thanks to @stephenjanaway for the picture.

• a chance to get people interested in whatever you are sharing with us.
• a chance to launch something.
• a chance to discuss what you have directly with your target market and get direct feedback.
• association with the London #TesterGathering.
• a pleasant evening with a lot of discussion.

There are 2 x 15-20 minute slots. Unless there are 2 sponsors in which case there is 1 extra session.

• 1 is for the sponsor.
• 1 is for someone from the community who wants to share something.

There is a VGA projector and/or a HD TV.

If it's required there is a portable PA system.

A sponsor is a person or organisation who:

• Has something to sell. 
• Has a presentation they would like to deliver related to something they sell.
• Wants to talk about something related to who/what they work with.
• May have a presentation with company logos all over it.

A community speaker is a person who:

• Has something to share.
• Has something they want to ask.
• Is there as a person and not a representative of a company.
• Will not have company logos anywhere.
• Will not profit in any financial way from the presentation.

Generally the evening starts at 18:00 and the talks being at 19:00.

I post the event details to meetup.com and use Twitter/Linkedin/word of mouth to spread the word.

The Twitter hashtag is #testergathering.

It is generally held once a month in London venue.

Please contact Marisol if you'd like to know more.

'What is this Exploratory Testing Thing?' presentation given at Agile Tour London 2014

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

Explaining testing: Quick win, small change

I didn't include testing because it's a quick win, it's only a small change.

London Tester Gathering Workshops 2014 - Exploratory Testing Session

Black Ops Testing Webinar, Monday 22nd September 2014

Black Ops Testing Webinar, Monday 22nd September 2014

Register for the webinar now

For our September Webinar we are going back to basics and testing a command line tool.

It feels all green screen and mainframe-esque.

This will challenge us to identify new tools, and refresh our earlier skillsets.

Make a note in your calendar for 22nd September 2014, when we use TaskWarrior as our application under test.

Register for the webinar now

Previous webinars are available here.