December 2013 in Helsinki, at the Software Development Summit 2013, I presented two Keynote talks:
I was fortunate in being asked to perform a keynote, and asked to fill in for a keynote speaker who unfortunately couldn’t attend, so I did two keynotes. Lucky me.
Experiences with Exploratory Testing in Agile, Testing, Dev and QA
The first was a talk built especially for the event entitled “Experiences with Exploratory Testing in Agile, Testing, Dev and QA”.
I was asked to share my experiences and lessons learned with exploratory testing across multiple disciplines because the audience included QA, Testers, Developers and Agile team members.
Basic Outline:
- A definition of ET from James Bach - reminding people that ET is a process, which also maps well on to PDCA, TOTE and other system models of learning and action
- An overview of my expectations of Exploratory Testing and the characteristics I expect to see and mentor people in adopting.
- Start to break down the beliefs about specialist roles by pointing out that some of the things we say deserve to be T-shirt slogans, rather than beliefs. With examples as to why ‘Developers’ can, should and do, test.
- Reasons why exploratory testing is ’natural’, and we can train and enhance our ’natural’ skills. And we should build on ’natural’ skills.
- How Exploration forms part of programming
- Experiences of Exploration within ‘structured’ environments
- Why exploratory testing can seem hard, and how managers can help
- For QA - mapping Juran’s definition of Quality on to Exploratory Testing and ‘Checking vs Testing’
- A few notes on how Agile invovles all of the above with shorter feedback cycles.
Slides for ‘Experiences of Exploratory Testing in Agile, Testing, Dev and QA’ on Google Docs
My Quest for Silver Bullets
The second was a slightly updated version of a talk that I previously presented at TestNet 2013 “My Quest for Silver Bullets”.
Slides for Helsinki version of ‘My Quest for Silver Bullets’
Links
- Slides for ‘Experiences of Exploratory Testing in Agile, Testing, Dev and QA’ on Google Docs
- Slides for ‘My Quest for Silver Bullets’
Conference Notes
I managed to catch up with Kristian Karl and learn more about the CI and testing regime at spotify, you can watch his Eurostar conference Experiences of Test Automation Webinar online.
I was able to quickly hang out and see a few of the twitter enabled attendees: Johan Atting, Johan Jonasson, Aleksis Tolonen, and Maaret Pyhäjärvi
But it was all over very quickly and I had very little time to chat with Ilari Aegerter or Gojko Adzic.
The only downside I had was that I had to miss Gojko’s Keynote because I thought I was flying out early. Of course the London Fog had other ideas so instead of learning from Gojko, I was stuck at the airport instead of enjoying the end of the conference :).
