The Agile Testing Days 2015: Nuggets

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:

1. 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:
   1. Commitment to Community
   2. Integrity
   3. Pride of Place
   4. Western Hospitality

   The first two of them are particularly applicable in all communities.

2. 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.
3. 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.

4. 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?