My incredibly late report out of the Agile Testing Days

So, three months after the the Agile Testing Days took place I’m finally presenting you my report out. Sorry for being this late, all the cool people already wrote down their thoughts. I want to take a different perspective so I will write about how the conference still influences my daily work. I already gave away a clue here, because yes, I am still influenced by the conference in many ways.

 Before heading to the main point of this article I would like to share some general thoughts though. It’s good for you to know, dear reader, that it was my first visit to a big conference. Two weeks before the ATD I didn’t even know that I was going. I was given the opportunity, for which I am still grateful. I remember all the exciting stuff very well, meeting loads of new people, having fun, and above all learning new things. On the first night I went out for dinner with two Dutch people and they told me that they had visited the conference the year before and took home loads of ideas and energy. This made me very curious but also raised expectations!

 I think what I liked most about the conference was meeting new people and hearing the wonderful ideas and experiences from those people. I’m still very young and I certainly don’t pretend to know everything. I’m only doing ‘the agile thing’ for about 2 years now, I’m only a baby.

 When I was back home again I was wondering if in a couple months I’d still experience value from the conference. With value I mean: does the conference influence the way I work? (assumption you can make: influence in a positive way). The presentations I liked the most were all pragmatic. The people who gave them were in situations similar to mine. They managed to share things that made me go ‘oh my, why didn’t I think of that myself!’ (that happens with most good ideas right?! They seem so obvious after hearing them).

 One of the recurring themes during the conference was the visualization of all things testrelated. As a tester you collect data, but do you use that data effectively? In my case I had been building an automated test-set for a couple of months, but I still didn’t make an overview of which parts of the application I had automated and which parts I hadn’t. Two talks at the conference inspired me to do so: (“Flying Under The Radar – how conventional testing was secretly transformed into sapient testing” Sami Söderblom) & “Making Test-Soup on a Nail – Getting From Nothing to Something” Gitte Ottosen. These two presentations were all about how to use mindmaps in your project. Why not use them test related? So that’s what I did when I got home. I made a mindmap of the part of the system that I tested. Literally every field was visualised. And I added colors to indicate which part was automated. When I was working on this I realised I didn’t automate some obvious things because I just forgot about it. Seeing my mistake was apparently what I needed.

 Another presentation I liked very much was from Lars Sjödahl: “The damage done by acts of silence”. One quote from his excerpt will make clear what his talk was about: “doing nothing does not protect you from blame”. We all know the meetings where the ‘obvious question’ isn’t asked because everybody is afraid to ask it and be ridiculed. But in the end vital information isn’t traded because everybody was too afraid to speak up. What I took home from his presentation was: don’t be afraid to ask questions, even if others might find them silly. It is your own responsibility to gather as much info you need to do your work properly. It is no secret that in IT, some people are introvert. So as a tester, even if you are shy, you can be the hero and ask the questions that maybe some people are too afraid to ask. Take a look here if you want to see what happens when people don’t speak up. It’s hilarious and sad at the same time.

 Beyond the presentations I took home new connections, new inspiration for work and new ideas. It was also really refreshing to be away from my project at home. The Agile Testing Days were like a ‘working vacation’.

 A last remark. Even though I am young, I am thinking that the problems the agile world faces aren’t new. I heard a lot of the same phrases: communicate better, how do we automate, what should we automate, tester & dev speak ‘different’ language, how do you build an effective team. Why isn’t it solved already? Is it solvable? Or will we just keep on talking about these things forever. I guess I will learn about that in the next couple of years.

Thank you for reading!