Come learn with me …
Despite writing a lot about testing, as I live in New Zealand, getting to conference can be a little tricky when anywhere outside of Australasia is about a day’s plane ride away and your company provides limited support for speaking.
Typically I’ve felt I’ve had a good year if I’m speaking somewhere. An exceptional year if I’m speaking twice in a year.
This year though … is going to be interesting. Below are some of the places where you can catch me …
The Challenge Of Being Sole Tester —Test Engineering Summit, Friday May 10th 2019, Auckland
A local gig, but I still have to get onto a plane (I hate flying). I’ll be talking about how my test team has shifted over the last few years from being a team testing a single product together under waterfall, to being a discipline spread over multiple agile teams.
What have we noticed with this shift? How do we cope? How has our job changed?
You can buy tickets from here.
Automated Test Kata — Agile Testing Days USA, Tuesday 25th June 2019, Chicago
I am really exciting to be bringing this workshop to America. I’ve run internally in my company as a series of one hour sessions which were a really big hit.
During the day we’ll be running a number of hands on exercises in automation, where we’ll take an area of functionality and “test the heck” out of it.
The exercises focus on unit testing in the morning (which is simpler to get a handle, but offers a lot of useful application), moving onto UI testing in Selenium in the afternoon.
The exercises use examples I’ve created in GitHub to “get you started” and allow people to build tests with very little Java experience. You essentially take an example, and are able to create a new test by just changing a few lines.
Later in the day we’ll run the full suite of tests against multiple builds to work out what the issues in each are. This single exercise has been the most powerful in my company about building familiarity at “looking into when things go wrong”.
By the end of the day you’ll have thought about what makes a good test, making things readable, good assertions to use, making test automation simple, compare unit vs UI tests, read error logs.
The tutorial is an additional cost to Agile Testing Days USA, but it’ll be an amazing experience which I know your company will benefit from you attending.
Find out more including how to book here.
How are we going to test this? A test strategy challenge —Agile Testing Days, Thursday 27th June, 2019, Chicago
You will notice, I love workshops. Often they’re an opportunity for me to learn as well as the audience. One of the reasons is because I often build workshops around what I call “mucky problems”, complex problems which don’t have a clean solution (like so much in life).
This is because I have a dislike of exercises like “you’re stranded in a desert, rate these items for your survival” which have a set answer.
In this exercise, I’ll introduce teams to a product which needs testing, and we’ll put together a plan. I’ll be teaching some of my approach which can be summarised by “come us with a load of ideas”, “collect together with some structure” and “look for gaps”.
This workshop definitely is covered by your admission to Agile Testing Days. Find out more here. [Currently still on Early Bird]
The Changing Role Of Test Leadership — Test Leadership Congress, Friday 28th June 2019, New York
But wait America, I’m not done! Seems I’m making the most of my first trip to the US.
This talk is a great companion piece to “being sole tester” — looking at how my role as a test leader is changing from being a test manager who is really “managing the tests” to being more of a coach who helps to develop and connect the testers. [Spoilers — this is why I have so much workshop material]
You can register for this event here.
Test Strategy Workshop — TestBash Australia, Thursday 24th October 2019, Sydney
This is a half day workshop which repeats some material from “how are we going to test this?” by allowing some extra exercises to get much deeper into the mindset of building strategies. As was pointed out to me, the extra material really is about embracing a more DevOps mentality to existing programs of work, and looking at how we can do things faster and more efficiently over accepting the Status Quo as gospel.
Find out more here.
The Testing Game — TestBash Australia, Friday 25th October 2019, Sydney
Sometimes when I submit a proposal for a conference, I’m driven to try something different. [If any of you saw me become 20 years younger in TestBash Brighton 2017, you’ll get that]
I’ll be running a testing exercise with the audience, just bring your phone! We’ll be testing a number of builds for a number guessing game, and trying to describe any patterns we see in it.
Playing the game, we’ll learn and reinforce a couple of patterns we need to think about when testing.
One of these patterns is so important, that if this is the ONLY THING that you learn from this conference, you will still have achieved sufficient value to your company from your price of attendance. [It’s a bold claim, but I absolutely stand by it]
Find out more here.
[On support from conference attendance — my company is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum that runs from providing no support, to fully support. Having talked to people who do a lot of speaking in a year, it sounds like something I have to be mindful to bring up at a future employer.]
