Perfect and great sessions… I’m thinking what I should say about the Agile Testing Days (ATD) 2010 in Berlin… it is great to meet and discuss agile testing with so many testers, developers, coaches, people who are interested in agile testing.
I attended a workshop of Michael Bolton on Monday. A lot of information on one day… he was doing the highlights of the Rapid Testing course in one day, normally this course takes three days. It was a very good tutorial, definitely worth the money and time. Some things I picked up from this session:
- testing == gathering/developing information;
- in agile environment is important to gather information as fast as possible;
- humans have the nature to learn, that’s what brought us to the 21nd century.. as a tester it is your task to learn thing about the software.. and you get even paid for learning things every day!
- as a tester you are helping the team and customer, doesn’t it give a warm feeling to help people? You get paid to help people ;);
- it is good to have testers with different backgrounds.. diversity is good. You will find more bugs and issues when people have different backgrounds;
- it is not your job as a tester to give a value about the software under tests, just provide the information to the stakeholders;
- automated tests, they tell you when you’re not done… They don’t tell you when you are done. When all tests are green, you’re not done testing;
- every testers, will focus on the “” correct pattern”.. you are looking for tests that confirm your findings… try to break that think pattern, test something that is not logical;
The first day of the conference was also very interesting, key notes of Lisa Crispin, Linda Rising and Elisabeth Hendrickson. Great key notes, some highlights of the keynotes:
- Key note Lisa Crispin:
- When you are not going to fix a problem, remove the problem from your bug registration system;
- Only register bugs when it adds value, not because it is required;
- Key note Linda Rising:
- Difficult to explain, but is was great and fun!
- Key note Elisabeth Hendrikson
- She is really a good presenter, she had the last key note at 17:40!. Everyone was awake and paying attention!
- The set up of the office is important, see also my blog about that topic;
I visited several interesting sessions during the day. A session about acceptance test driven development using Robot Framework by Pekka Klärck, Error Driven Development by Alexandra Imrie and Structures kill testing creativy by Rob Lambert.
Spoke with several people and exchanged ideas about agile testing. Got an introduction about testing in open source projects by Peter Vadja. Discussed distributed scrum with a person from Ctco. Realised that it is important to find out what the root cause of a problem is, despite good symptom fighting.
To summarize in one word… great!