Over the weekend of March 18/19 I attended NWEWT2 at the
former Atlantic Tower Hotel, now Mercure in Liverpool. Following on from its inaugural outing last
year this deep dive conference focused on the theme of ‘Growing Testers’ with
its two primary questions;
- As a Tester, how do you
grow to keep up with the current trends in testing and development?
- As someone responsible for
leading Testers, how do you help Testers grow?
Each attendee gave a talk on their thoughts, experience,
models and ideas for growing Testers.
The audience was varied from those who regularly present at conferences
to those with only a few years experience in software testing. Following each talk it was ‘open
season.’ The facilitator would note who
had questions using a card system I hadn’t encountered before. Green was a question following a talk, yellow
was a follow up question during a ‘green’ thread and red if you had to say something
immediately. Fortunately there was only
1 of those and despite being taxing on our hard working facilitator it worked
really well in not only ensuring conversations flowed with no interruptions,
but also making sure everyone’s points were heard. It also encouraged us to go deep into
subjects and challenge each others ideas, cordially of course.
My presentation focused on the
creation and on-going development of Test
Xchange, our internal testing community over the last year or so. I offered our emergent model of a risk based
participant built backlog and regular agenda items of lightning talks,
discussions and testing challenges.
Given I heard about this opportunity at fairly short notice I must
confess to a bit of a ‘cheat’ here as most of the material came from a
scheduled talk I am giving at Test Atelier in Leeds on the 9th of
May. So that was lucky! (See related blog for more)
My main goals, besides sharing the great work our testing
community has done in knowledge sharing, was to gain an understanding of how
others were approaching tester development and bring back ideas we could
use. With coffee helping abate yawns
from my 6am start driving from Yorkshire to Liverpool ready for a 9am start, we
began. So, what were the things I learnt
over the two days?
How does your garden grow?
There are so many ways
to grow, gain knowledge and share information about testing. The Testing Community is wide and diverse and
there are many conferences, events and meet ups happening all round the
country. Online resources such as the
Ministry of Testing are hubs of information not to mention the many talented
individuals writing blogs. Online
magazines pass on knowledge and ideas while there are many excellent books on
the subject. YouTube is also a brilliant
resource to watch the most ‘famous’ industry thought leaders share their
views. No matter your learning style
there’s something for you out there. All
you have to do is find the time!
I’m forever growing
bubbles!
The Testing Community wants to help educators to pass on testing
skills. We all live in bubbles. Family bubbles, social bubbles, community
bubbles etc. At the moment there’s an
education bubble around software development that doesn’t have much room for
the Testing Profession. Course
literature and Computer Science curriculums have little reference to testing as
a discipline. There were some passionate
opinions expressed on reaching out to schools and Universities and offering the
Testing Communities services to pass on knowledge of the ‘real world’ and
testing skills, philosophies and passions.
The four-hour tester (http://www.fourhourtester.net/)
is a project that focused on simple exercises to teach some of the skills and
thought processes needed by testers. I
particularly like the Mary had a little lamb heuristic. Give it a try. The weekend testing community (www.weekendtesting.com) recently
undertook a similar activity to create a testing syllabus. Also well worth a read. The question is now, am I brave enough to
stand up in front of impressionable younglings and promote our profession? I’ll get back to you on that one… What is for
sure is that more efforts are needed to get out of our bubbles and into others.
How did I get here?
Very few
people plan to be a tester. Going
round the table and aptly demonstrated by ‘Bullseye or The Testing Wheel’
(presentation available on slideshare.net by Ash Winter), career models are
perceived as linear but very rarely are.
Despite our best plans be it through assignments, job change or sideways
movement, most people swirl around quite a bit on their journey. My own path to here has included roles such
as logistics manager, auditor, director, business intelligence manager and test
team lead to name a few. While I had
some version of testing in other roles it was by being asked to perform testing
on a software system that peaked my interest. Then when I found out such an
interesting and fun activity was a real full time job I was hooked. What I didn’t realise is that there are so
many similar stories of people moving in many varied directions on their road
to becoming testers. Maybe, like the
saying about love, you don’t find testing, it finds you?
Mums have the best
sayings!
You can’t stick your apples on other people’s trees! Jit Gosai (test engineer at the BBC) talked
to us about how he saw Mark Zuckerberg had floated Facebook and made billions
at 27. He was 27. Did that make him a failure? Of course not, but he vowed to do more, learn
more and share what he found with others.
Later he was frustrated his sharing wasn’t landing how he’d like. His mum told him about apples. You can influence, you can give knowledge,
you can lead, but you can’t make
your ideas be someone else’s. That
doesn’t mean you should stop trying to share with those around you. No matter
how annoying they are!
So that’s some, but far from the only things learnt over an
extremely enjoyable conference. I’ve a
decent sized list of people, models and sites I want to look into. Another decent list of ideas for discussions,
challenges and things we can do at Test Xchange. Even some blog ideas. And maybe, if I’m brave enough and survive
Test Atelier, some more talks too.