Category: Conferences

Agile Testing Days 2022

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It’s that season again: I attended the 2022 edition of the Agile Testing Days. There are already blog posts by Lisi Hocke ‘Agile Testing Days 2022 – The Unicorn Land We Build Together‘ and Stéphanie Desby ‘What I’ve learned at Agile Testing Days 2022‘. They already cover a lot of the remarkable sessions – and really, I think there’s no replacement to attend this conference in person. I’ll focus on the few things I find particularly noteworthy.

I arrived the day before the conference started and went to the gym & pool area first. After a 5½ hour drive through changing weather conditions (snow, fog, hail, sunshine, rain, more snow, sleet, and finally some more sunshine), this is just the right thing for me to shake off the stress.

Tutorial Day ‘Problem Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices‘ with Ben Linders

I very much enjoyed this well organised tutorial. Ben presented several way to find problems and then solve them. This included some role playing and games. What I appreciate: We got all the material needed to use the games in our projects as well as his ebook ‘Impediments – Problem? What Problem?’. That’s going to be so useful when applying the exercises in my projects – or playing the game with my teams (when I will meet teams in person).

The day was made even better, since I received the confirmation that I am booked for my next project. This is especially nice, since I have worked with the team already and like it a lot!

Day 1

I found Lily Higham’s talk ‘Testing the BBC World Service‘ exciting, since she explained how her team has to cover an incredibly large number of systems, languages and devices. One important insight: ‘Test with real devices’. Also remarkable: She noted how the BBC has to deal with being blocked in some countries and how, in some cases, professional smugglers help spreading the news anyway. No details about this were shared for a good reason. We were advised against trying the smuggling ourselves.

Dermot Canniffe presented ‘BDD And The Sleepy Developer‘, and made the point about the effects a sleep disorder can have during work incredibly well.

During the OpenSpace on this day we shared some information about Mastodon – and what to consider when joining it. My point of view: Two things are important:

  1. The server you chose
  2. The account name

While I didn’t use them in the Open Space, here are slides I prepared just in case:

For easy reference, here are the links used in the slides:

As is a tradition by now the first day ended with a themed costume party. This year the ‘dress code’ was ‘Fairytales’. This is also the Award Night to celebrate MIATPP (Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person) of the year, this time won by Janet Gregory. Congratulations!

Day 2

On this day, I missed quite a few sessions I wanted to attend, since I held a workshop “Fast Feedback Using Ruby”. With about 10 people attending it was just the right size to help with the many things that can (and will) go wrong in a workshop where coding is a major part. Being (maybe over-) prepared helped a lot: While I had some material prepared to be downloaded, I knew (from experience in an earlier year) that conference WiFi may – or may not – work well. I now bring my own WiFi, so I have a back-up in case the conference one doesn’t work so well. I also had the downloadable material on a tiny small local web server – and a USB stick. Yes, I was over prepared, very likely.

In case you considered this workshop, but attended another session: There is an ebook(let) available on LeanPub, which covers the workshop. And there still are a few coupons let to grab it for free: https://leanpub.com/fastfeedbackusingruby/c/ATD-2022. Additionally there is a GitHub repository at https://github.com/s2k/fastfeedbackusingruby_workshop. The slides from the workshop are available as Fast Feedback Using Ruby slides.

The day ended with the first ‘AgileTD book fair‘ and the ‘Digesting Poets Society‘. I had the pleasure to present ‘Software People … Work From Home — Insights & Experiences From Planet Earth‘, a free ebook to which contributors from (so far) 28 countries and 33 authors provided text about life during the pandemic. Only while I was talking to some of the new readers, I realised that this wasn’t a writing task for me (I still have to add my contribution), but a project management job. Organising so many people from so many countries was – and still is – some work, but oh what a pleasure, too.

Day 3

What I remember from this day most of all, is what Stéphanie Desby shared with me about her break from – and return to working in tech. I find it super interesting what leads people to leave tech, at least for a while, and then come back. As I had to leave tech for while myself, that’s probably no too surprising.

An Afterthought

I remember that in some (pre-pandemic) years, the conference covered the whole week, either with 2 tutorial days, or 4 conference days. While I thought the conference should move back to this longer format, now I’m not so convinced anymore. 4 full days with a LOT of input, talking and, yes, having fun, is demanding.

That said: I am already looking forward to the Agile Testing Days 2023! 🦄🌈

Euruko 2022 in Helsinki

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The Euruko 2022 master of ceremony Antti on the stage

After a 10 year break I made it to an in-person Ruby conference again: Euruko 2022 in Helsinki. For travelling, I chose the Finnlines ferry from Travemünde to Helsinki. That’s travelling without a hurry, since each trip takes 30 hours. At the time of this writing, I’m sitting in the ship’s café looking out over the Baltic Sea into the sunshine, just south of Oland and slowly approaching and then passing Bornholm. There are worse places to write a post. 😁

A sunrise over the Baltic Sea: Near the horizon the sky is free of clouds, above is a thin layer of clouds. below the sea is watery and looks cold.
Sunrise over the Baltic Sea
Photo taken onboard the Finnmaid, while approaching the port of Vuosaari, Finland

Thankfully there’s a gym, a sauna (if a Finish line after all) and lots of nice places to take a seat watch the waves pass by. I even met the fist few other attendees on the ferry already!

Even before reaching Helsinki, Leo Kiisi one of the organisers, sent an invitation to join the sauna – including access to the open water. We met in the evening and had a great time as several attendees and a speaker joined. It was a fantastic way the end the first travel day, relaxing, refreshing and overall remarkable.

The opening Keynote was recorded and presented by Matz, and he busted several myths and claims that were made about Ruby. What surprised me most, is his take on type systems: He explained that (at least some) type systems are Turing compete. which means that the type system alone is already complex enough to encode any algorithm or program. 🤯 — Whether that’s desirable or not is another question. 😉

Wiktoria Dalach told us about how security aspects can be handled, by categorising the infinite space of possible issues into only thee categories:

  1. Confidentiality: How to keep secrets secret
  2. Integrity: How to be sure that we get what we expect
  3. Availability: Ability to access our information always

What we’d need do do ourselves: Select the aspects from these categories that are most important to us — and them work on them.

Adarsh Pandit told us about ‘The Technical and Organizational Infrastructure of the Ruby Community’ – and drew parallels to the transportation infrastructure differences he found between California (where he lives) and Finland. I understood that the difference is mainly that in the US transportation seems to optimise the number of cars the system can handle, while in Finland it’s more the number of people and how they can get from A to B. We also learned how individuals (and companies) can support the Ruby community:

  • Contributing to the language implementation(s) and its libraries: The code is still being optimised, bugs a fixed etc. All think work needs to be done by someone. Thank someone could be you.
  • Support Ruby Central/Ruby Together with money: In the end services such as Rubygems (and its website & repositories), Bundler etc. require hardware to run on and that costs money. These projects are also improved and that involves investing time and/or money as well.
    BTW, you can support RubyTogether at https://rubytogether.org.

An amusing point Adarsh made: He said that Finland seems to have the happiest people and at the same time the angriest music. (Note: Finland has the highest number of mates rock bands per capita worldwide).

Vesa Vänskä explained how to move ‘From massive pull requests to trunk-based development with Ruby’ – and reminded us of Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt’s observation:

I say an hour lost at a bottleneck is an hour out of the entire system. I say an hour saved at a non-bottleneck is worthless. Bottlenecks govern both throughput and inventory.

Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt

Be sure to check out the talks on the conference site; I believe, at least some talks were recorded and will be available in the next few days. As always, I thoroughly enjoyed the conference days, meeting many new people, the great food at the lovely location.

I’m already looking forward to the next Ruby conference I’ll attend. It may be the next EURUKO and the community voted for Vilnius, Lithuania.

Reviewing Submissions for the Agile Testing Days

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Other reviewers have also blogged about this topic:

The other day a discussion about the review process of the Agile Testing Days developed:

Since I contributed to this thread and was a reviewer for this years programme, here’s my take. It’s my personal view and other reviewers may well have other aspects they focus on.

  1. On the conference page there are blog posts covering how to write a good proposal. I suggest to read them. This blog contains some tips as well:
  2. The conference offers a list of ‘hot topics’ which changes each year. If a proposal fits to this list it’s a plus, since this is a step towards a consistent conference programme.
  3. I prefer proposals that catch my interest, without telling too much about the topic. – If a proposal already expels everything well, time may be better spent in another session.
  4. A well written abstract text, that is easy to understand (for me) is a plus, too. This includes avoiding typos and grammatical mistakes. We all make them, and even the best spell checkers can’t catch all issues. But still, some proposals are really hard to understand due to language problems. Don’t let that get in your way of getting accepted. My tip: Get feedback by a native English speaker before (!) submitting. Many well known testers and speakers offer help and it is worthwhile accepting this help.
  5. Understand what the fields in the proposal form are meant for. Fill them to provided the information that is asked for,
    Avoid repeating the same text in different parts for the form. Change the wording at least a bit. In some cases the title, sub headline, main statement and key learning(s) contained exactly the same or very similar text. To me as the reviewer this is a little bit boring, and doesn’t help me understand what the session is about.
  6. Sometimes, repeating is worthwhile: It helps to understand what is important. Use this tool carefully.

Some questions may guide to writing a good proposal:

  • Will this help the reviewer to give me a high rating?
  • Am I giving enough information to inform a potential attendees decision to come to my session?
  • Am I giving too much information?
  • Is this a good fit for the conference this year?

A leaving personal note: It took me years to get accepted at the Agile Testing Days, even for what was then called a ‘consensus talk’. In the very early years the proposals weren’t very well written, in some years I failed to match the overall conference theme. And then it clicked, I asked for help, gave workshops, a tutorial and, in 2019 even a keynote. For me it was worth the effort.

Good luck and may your proposals be accepted!

Agile Testing Days 2021 – Part 3

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If you haven’t you might be interested to read the previous part of this series as well.

This day impressed me most by the three key notes and discussing the effects of corona and working from home with Anne Colder.

Thursday

The first keynote of the day was Ard Kramer’s “How to nudge your way through agile testing”. Ard presented six ways to nudge people to make a decision in a certain way – probably a way that we want them to go. In a very consistent way he made the distinction between doing something (the nudging) and the ethics of doing it.

It’s so important to aware of these techniques, because then we can more consciously decide whether or not to follow the nudging.

These are the six kinds of nudging he explained:

  • Default options
  • Commitment through consistency
  • Anchoring
  • Decoy effect
  • Zeigarnik effect
  • Activate unconscious behaviour

The name Zeigarnik effect was new to me, although I read about the way it works somewhere on the net. Basically it states that one can remember an activity that has been interrupted (not not completed) more easily at a later point in time.

“The Tester’s Learning Toolkit” was the second keynote, presented by Vera Baum. Supported by incredibly great graphics Vera explained the various levels of experience people may have.

  1. Novice
  2. Apprentice
  3. Crafter
  4. Expert

She explained how we can develop from level to level, and why it may not be the best approach to let experts teach novices.

The last keynote of the day – and the conference – was Vernon Richards‘ “What does the ‘Coach’ in ‘Quality Coach’ mean?”. He introduced 6 styles of leadership and how they can be applied in the context of software quality. I loved his way of giving examples his experiences in applying them.

With this highly interesting and super entertaining keynote ended the official program of the Agile Testing Days 2021.

In the evening, I discussed the effects of having to work from home with Anne Colder, leading to another contribution for the ebook “Software People … Work From Home“. Stay tuned. 🙂

This ended a truly brilliant experience of the Agile Testing Days. It was so great to finally meet real testers in real live, discuss software related topics during breakfast, lunch and dinner… as well as in between.

Thank you! Thank you to everyone I spoke to, especially the organisers who ran an incredible conference!

Agile Testing Days 2021 – Part 2

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If you haven’t read it yet, you may like to start with the first part of my Agile Testing Days 2021 summary.

Wednesday

I started Wednesday with a Lean Coffee. At the Agile Testing Days this is traditionally facilitated by Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin.

We discussed a good number of topics, such as how to get folks to try new ways, ways to practice testing and the role of testing/testers. I like this way of quickly covering a broad field of topics, to give people input to work with. I recommend tying this format, if you haven’t done so yet.

Jutta Eckstein‘s keynote “Agile Comes with a Responsibility for Sustainability” covered the three main parts of sustainability:

  1. People, the social equity bottom line
  2. Planet, the environmental bottom line
  3. Profit, the economic bottom line

See for example the Wikipedia article about the ‘Triple Botton Line’ for more details. I find that these aspects are all incredibly important and also believe that we, the community of software people, have a shared responsibility to help achieve improvements in all three areas.

The second keynote on Wednesday was João Proença‘s “Limitless within our boundaries”. He explained nicely how limiting options can improve creative work. His example were his Band that got completely stuck, when they experienced the possibilities of a music studio for the first time. It’s the same in most other contexts, including software development. I very relaxed presentation style and body language. I found it super nice that he reminded me, that I recommended submitting a session to the Agile Testing Days – and I am really, really glad I did.

The session “Resistance is futile” by Anne Colder & Jantien van der Meer, was about how to facilitate changing behaviour. The session was Star Trek themed and I am luck I survived in my red shirt. 🙂 Details about the model of “The Rider, the elephant and the path” are, for example, available at https://www.creativehuddle.co.uk/post/the-elephant-and-the-rider. I like the way they explained the model as well as the exercises to illustrate how it can be used.

For me Bruce Hughes‘ keynote “How to be an Ally to Non-binary Folk in Tech” was next. It was brilliant, hilarious, sad and helpful. The standing ovations she received were absolutely well deserved. The blog post appache attack helicopter wrote at https://undevelopedbruce.com/2020/07/06/non-binary-in-tech/ explains what was covered in xer keynote. I recommend reading it. To her ‘appache attack helicopter’ is an acceptable pronouns BTW. See: https://undevelopedbruce.com/about-me/ (read that as well, I may help further understanding the complexities of existence). Lisi Hocke tweeted a great summary of this keynote:

The last session I attended as Søren Wassard‘s “Digesting Poets Society”. A very nice, relaxing and emotional bonus session about another way to get creative: Poems. We mostly heard English poems, but also one from a Welsh author, recited in Welsh by a Welsh (and no other than Bruce).

Part 3 of the series is available now, too.

© 2012-2023 Stephan Kämper — Mastodon

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