Back home… as already stated in my first report, it was a great conference!
It started with the keynote of Michael Bolton, several slides/visions were already discussed during this tutorial that I attended on Monday. It always surprises me how difficult people find it to answer the question what is quality…. I love the description of Micheal and James Bach: “value of a product to someone who matters”. The description of testing that is used by Michael is also surprising simple and powerful: “testing is an investigation/exploration to get information about the quality of a product”. I agree with Micheal that automated testing is very useful, but not the only thing that should be done in a project. I recognize the problem that testers focus too much on test automation and spend not enough time on exploratory testing.
I loved also the analogy between testing and CSI. Testers provide the data for the judge (In the Netherlands we don’t have a jury 😉 ) to make a verdict. Of course, the CSI investigators work closely with the police and judges. Testers work closely with the programmers (We are all developers, testers, technical writing, programmers, we all develop software) and customers.
The presentation of Gojko Adzic was a great statement against certification. He changed his presentation the night before and it was great. Check out twitter and all the blogs that are write about his presentation. One of the main topics during the conference was the discussion about certification. To state the general feeling: when you attend the scrum master certification for two days, you are certified Scrum Master… are you after two days a Scrum Master who is able to coach and improve a team… I don’t think so…
Lior Friedman had good session about feedback. To summarize… agile is all about feedback and by making the steps smaller and smaller, you are able to get feedback sooner. As a result, it is possible to improve your self after every step. In the end he showed a tool to that automatically runs the unit tests that are affected by a code change. A very interesting tool, I will do some research and find out if there is an comparable tool for Java.
The last session I attended was of Markus Gärtner. He had a session about self educating, and is of the opinion that a tester should take his own responsibility in become an experienced/skilled testers. I totally agree with that. In his session he showed several ways how you could improve your self as a tester. For example http://weekendtesting.com/ and organizing Testing Dojo’s.
It was my first time on the agile testing days. However, I hope not my last!
Thanks for your nice summary. Though, I tend to generalize the learning responsibility part. I got the idea initially from Uncle Bob Martin for programmers, but it later turned out that James Bach also mentioned it in one of his slide decks. In general I would coin it the First Law of Professionalism:
Your learning is your responsibility. Yours and yours alone.
(I also coined a zeroth law in this article here: http://www.shino.de/publications/Software%20Testing%20Craft%20-%20Agile%20Record%2001.pdf)
Hope to see you next time again!