The opening session of the Agile Testing Days 2015 was Western-themed and Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin asked the audience to watch for gold nuggets at the conference — particularly valuable information or other things we would take home. I (actually my alter ego Super Agile Person) was invited to present my suggests at the ending session. So these are the nuggets I found at the conference:
- I got a Calgary Stampede hat from Lisa and Janet. Thank you so much!
It’s great, it fits and it even has inner values printed on the inside:
- Commitment to Community
- Integrity
- Pride of Place
- Western Hospitality
The first two of them are particularly applicable in all communities.
- In their opening keynote Alex Schladebeck (violin) and Huib Schoots (trombone) connected music to testing and played music too. They even handed out a large number of kazoos to the audience to play along with them!
I find the connection they drew fascinating, since other presentations I attended this year presented connections between testing and other activities. Two examples from FullStackFest are Ernie Miller‘s talk “How to Build a Skyscraper” and Lauren Scott‘s presentation “Shall I Compare Thee to a Line of Code?“.
I’m thinking about other connections, but that’s another blog post. - Many people use templates to write user stories or charters for exploratory testing sessions. A widely used user story template is this:
As a <role>; I want <feature>, so that <benefit>
While these templates can be very helpful to start, they are also somewhat limiting — and can lead to outcomes like ‘As the product owner I want feature X, so that feature X can be used’. This is not — repeat not — how the template is used well.
While templates can be worthwhile to get started with using user stories (for example), they can become too constraining as a team becomes more proficient in using them.
In that case, I suggest to use the term Free Style User Stories and Karen Greaves already helped me spreading the word:@superagilepersn is starting a movement #FreeStyleUserStories #agileTD
— Karen Greaves (@karen_greaves) November 12, 2015
Thank you!
This too, will be covered in a future blog post. - Finding followers and starting a movement is possible for everyone. This was a popular topic in a number of sessions, Dr. Sue Black‘s keynote “If I Can Do It, So Can You” in particular.
Note, ‘nugget finding’ is not limited to conferences! What are the nuggets you found in the past week?