Passion-Driven Community

Roughly a week ago, I participated to my first testing conference. The conference was called Let’s Test and it was held in Runö, Sweden (30 minutes from Stockholm, with a taxi). If you want to know more about it, I suggest you go to their website: http://lets-test.com/

I knew in advance, that the conference would include many of the biggest names of our industry (e.g. James Bach, Michael Bolton, James Lyndsay, Johanna Rothman, Scott Barber, Pradeep Soundararajan, Fiona Charles, Griffin Jones, Julian Harty, Iain McCowatt). There were also a lot of people, that I had discussed with on Twitter, but had never met. In the end, many of these people held sessions, tutorials and keynotes.

If you are interested, I wrote a blog post before conference. There I experimented with Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hat approach to Let’s Test conference (especially the value I would gain out of it – and fear of not gaining value out of it). You can find the blog post here: https://flowoftesting.wordpress.com/2013/05/10/338/

Passion

I think the word passion describes extremely well, why I ended up in Runö with testers around the world. I have a passion for testing, which means, that I constantly seek for ways to evolve as a tester. I’m just guessing here, but I’d assume that people who came up with the idea of Let’s Test (Henrik, Johan and Ola – Ola sadly passed away in October 2012 and I never had the chance to meet him), were also thinking of ways to evolving our craft. What better way of doing, that than gathering many of the experts of our craft and arranging a place with spectacular nature, food and activities. Rest is magic.

It might be my subjective opinion, but I feel, that passion feeds passion. When I talk to people, who are as passionate (or more) as I am, it affects positively to my passion. Interacting with various people who shared my love to testing, left me a smile, that lasted even when I left Runö after the conference.

Who were these people you might ask? I’ll share few, that were special from my perspective

Monday

Seeing the people of our Context-Driven Testing community, started from the airport of Arlanda (unless you count meeting up with my colleague on Helsinki-Vantaa airport). In Arlanda I first met Ru Cindrea, whom we had agreed to share a taxi with. Ru is highly influential Romanian tester at Finland, that is evolving to Test Lab expert (she might already be there actually). I’ve met her few times before, and if there’s someone out there, that I believe can walk the walk, that’s her.

We had also agreed to meet Kristoffer Nordström on Arlanda. Kristoffer was also one of the people I knew the most through Twitter. We had agreed to participate to LetsTest Lab with Jari Laakso and Geir Gulbrandsen. Kristoffer currently works as a test developer and he had also helped me earlier (by creating a python script for tailing a log file in Unix). I had not met him before, but his talk on Lean Tribe Gathering 12 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iclr1MZzC-s) gave me the impression, that he’s a passionate tester. After struggling with finding each other, we finally met Kristoffer and took the taxi to Runö. There was funny incident with the navigation software, on the taxi we picked. You can see it from this picture (took by Kristoffer):

When we arrived to Runö, we were welcomed by Ilari Henrik Aegerter and Huib Schoots (knew both from Twitter, but not met before). Ilari greeted me in Finnish (he’s originally from Finland), which was a surprise. Not because he could speak it, but because he could speak it so well. Ilari is a manager on eBay and lives on Zurich. He has been focusing on observing, for a while now. I became familiar with it, when he held his CAST 2012 talk Observational Proficiency: How Sharpening Your Everyday Awareness Makes You a Better Tester. Huib on the other hand is quite a character, whom I knew from Twitter, his blog and recently a talk from TestBash 2.0. He talked about social sciences, and what testers can learn from it. I already knew, that he was a sparkly person. Now, after the conference, my opinion has not changed at all.

I had to rush to first keynote, as I had about 15 minutes, for taking a shower and eating a breakfast. Before James Bach’s keynote, there was an emotional talk from Henrik Andersson. He talked about how Ola had affected a lot the program of the conference, and how several companies (and people) helped with arranging it. You could see, that it was emotionally hard for Henrik, to step into that stage. He did well in those circumstances. Paul Holland continued by introducing James Bach. I knew Paul in some level in advance. I had watched his CAST talk from last year How to Report Test Progress and Paul had also helped me in Skype with an oracle problem I had in my current project. If you were going to drink a beer, and you had to choose one person to drink it with, Paul would probably be that. Extremely approachable and wide knowledge about testing.

James (Bach) on the other hand, was only one from the world wide known experts, that I had met before the conference. I participated to James’s RST course on October 2012. I wrote a blog post then, where I described my impressions about him. So, I knew he from there and Twitter, where we’ve discussed about testing several times. Often I agree with what James is saying, but we also have had disagreements. James has not though run away my questions ever, and that is where he has earned my respect. In Let’s Test, James talked about How Do I Know I’m Context-Driven? I’m not going to summarize the talk here, as you can find details about it in other blog posts. I will say though, that it meant to me a lot when James declared, that I belong to the center of the community (you understand more, if the talk is published later).

After the talk, I met Geir Gulbrandsen and Martin Hynie, . If Markus Gärtner is the only tester in Germany, then Geir Gulbrandsen is the only tester in Norway. He’s a passionate guy, who has for example passed all the AST BBST courses (this is a major achievement), and writes a blog. I know him mainly from Twitter, where we’ve had many valuable discussions about testing. Martin Hynie on the other hand, is an extremely sharp guy from Canada. I initially got to know him on Twitter, but we got more familiar with each other, when he reviewed an article of mine. His review varied from others, as it included e.g. expressing emotions. I talked with him few times on Let’s Test, and I want to say, that you need to pay attention to this guy. He has a lot to say, and it’s worth listening.

Rest of the first day went with James Bach’s tutorial “In-depth look at the art of reporting”. Before the tutorial started, I managed to meet Jari Laakso and Helena Jeret-Mäe. I knew both of them fairly well in advance, from Twitter and Skype. Both of them had also reviewed the article I mentioned earlier. Jari Laakso is a Finnish tester, who is living in Romania. I’ve learned to know, that he has extremely critical mind. We’ve had several conversations where questions just keep flying. I’ve also noticed, that there’s interesting diversity in our thinking, as we often approach things from different angles. Helena Jeret-Mäe comes from Estonia, writes a blog, and has an amazingly wonderful way of thinking. I’ve learned about her thinking in our several conversations. She’s definitely a person, that should share more her thoughts for our community.

During the tutorial I met John Stevenson and Peter Schrijver. I did not knew John Stevenson that well in advance. I only knew him from Twitter and from his brilliant blog posts. He turned out to be a passionate fellow with deep knowledge about telecommunication (and testing of course). Peter on the other hand I know from 5 Blogs and of course from Twitter. I knew, that he is highly involved with DEWT (Dutch Exploratory Workshop in Testing) and just attended PSL course. I got an impression from our discussions during the tutorial, that he has a lot of experience and good ability to describe his approach to testing.

In the evening we participated to LetsTest Lab with Jari Laakso, Geir Gulbrandsen and Kristoffer Nordström. We arrived there though quite late, and struggled with connectivity to a server. Eventually it was quite a catastrophe, as we couldn’t come up with anything useful, to report about. I actually went after the Test Lab (approximately 22pm), to sleep. I had woke up 4 am and slept 4 hours on previous night, which affected a lot to this.

Tuesday

After Johanna Rothman’s Kick-Ass keynote, I headed for Duncan Nisbet’s session “The Typo In Testing – Let’s Taste!”. I knew Duncan a bit in advance from Twitter, where we’ve discussed. My impression was, that he was a passionate guy, who had also attended PSL course. Later I heard, that he had sold his car to get to the course. I think that describes the level of commitment to becoming a better tester. Duncan is also a really laid back guy, so you get along with him easily. That’s valuable attribute for a tester.

My second session was supposed to be Pete Houghton’s “That’s a bit random! Using randomness to help you test“, but I noticed my colleague (Samuli – @samuliel) was there already. We had agreed, that we would record the sessions with voice recorder. So I headed for Dawn Haynes’s session “Talking To Triangles”. Afterwards thinking, I’m glad I did. Dawn turned out to be an interesting person, with a lot of experience from our industry. She works at PerfTestPlus, and is an advocate of performance testing.  At some point she mentioned, that she is like a pit bull sometimes. If there’s uncertainty about something, and she wants to know more about it, she will not stop before receiving answers. I could totally imagine that, as she seemed a person with a lot of courage.

The final session of the day was Tobias Fors’s “Systems Thinking For The Rest Of Us“. Last year I wrote a blog post about Russell Ackoff, whom I respect a lot. Therefore I was really interested of participating on Tobias’s session. I did not know him in advance, but I had seen his talk in Oredev 2011. I thought it was great, and figured, that the session would be good opportunity for discussing about systems thinking. Session itself was extremely interactive, but after it came the exciting part. We discussed with few others about e.g. reasons why systems thinking has not spread more widely. Tobias also pointed me to an article by Ackoff – A BRIEF GUIDE TO INTERACTIVE PLANNING AND IDEALIZED DESIGN. I ended up also meeting Michael Bolton (I think he does not need an introduction. In case you don’t know him, check: http://www.developsense.com/blog/). We discussed (I mainly ended up listening) after that about a model, that was shown during the session. Michael gave some feedback about it and eventually the conversation led to Deep Blue.

During lunches and dinner, I managed to meet also few other people, that I had hoped to meet. These were Iain McCowatt, Simon Morley and Julian Harty. Iain is working for CGI, and lives in Canada. If I remember correctly, he is though from UK. I first got to know Iain through his blog posts about regression testing (Rethinking Regression). I thought they were brilliant. After, that I witnessed how he constantly expressed thoughtful approach to testing, on Twitter. Lately there’s been several fascinating discussions between James Bach, Michael Bolton, Iain McCowatt and Jesse Thomas Alford. There’s also an interesting video, where Iain talks about lessons we can learn from medical professionals and how testers think on “CAST Live”. Those lessons learned from medical professionals, was actually one of the topics we discussed while eating.

Simon Morley was even less familiar, than Iain, to me. I knew him mainly from Twitter (like most of the others). I also knew about his blog, which contained a lot of thoughtful posts about testing. Eventually we had really interesting discussions with Simon, and I found out, that he is a sharp minded tester. One of the topics we talked, was Griffin Jones’s session. It had raised some thoughts in Simon’s mind. Even though I did not participated to it, I found similarities with, what Cem Kaner discussed about in BBST Bug Advocacy course lectures (he talked there about credibility of proof and how it affects lawyers credibility).

I’m not now entirely sure, but I think I met Julian Harty on Tuesday. Anyway, I joined a queue, that led to dinner or lunch. I noticed Julian there and introduced myself. He knew me, because I had made him a question about Six Thinking Hats. I became familiar with Julian, when I found his talk from 2011 Starwest. There he talked how he has applied Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hat’s to problems in his work. I liked a lot the talk, and have seen it several times. I even ended up experimenting with the method, and did a blog post about it (I mentioned it already earlier). We talked with Julian for the whole time we were on the queue. He recommended to me, Ken Hudson’s book, that includes 60 techniques for solving problems. He didn’t mention the name, but I figured out, that it was The Idea Accelerator: How To Solve Problems Faster Using Speed Thinking. I already ordered that one. Other book, that Julian recommended was Sam Kaner’s (Cem Kaner’s brother apparently) Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making. Rest of the time, we talked about using the Six Thinking Hats method.

I decided on Tuesday, that I would go again to Test Lab, as I was not satisfied with how Monday went there. We had a team with Jari, Geir and Kristoffer, but I figured out, that they probably wanted to confer instead of Test Lab. I noticed them, that I was going and didn’t want to force them there. On the Test Lab, I formed a team with Michael, who was a Swiss tester with test automation background. There was also third person in our team, who was Daniel (if I remember correctly). Considering, that he spoke Swedish, I figured out he was from Sweden. We ended up testing Mumble. We didn’t have headphones, which restricted our scope quite a bit, as Mumble is an open source voice communication software. It wasn’t that bad though, as there was still a lot to explore. After struggling a bit with note taking, we ended up making our notes to Mindomo. There we could simultaneously add notes about our testing.

Mind map by Zeger van Hese’s group on Test Lab (Beside Zeger, there were Ruud Cox, Ilari Henrik Aegerter, Peter Duelen and Levente Balint)

Test Lab was incredible experience. After roughly 1,5 hours of testing, we reported the information we had revealed. Before us, there was people like Zeger van Hese (whose group created that awesome mind map, you see above), Michael Bolton, Richard Robinson and Pradeep Soundararajan, reporting their findings (I think that’s a true mark of an expert, that you can also show, that you can walk the walk). It was almost 11pm on Tuesday evening, and the room was full of people. People were testing, explaining their findings, discussing about testing and learning(!). This is what every testing conference should include! I told about this, at work after I came back. I said I was on testing conference, and colleague (not same company) asked if we tested. I said “Sure.” He said after that, that it was a joke. Then he asked “Did you really test?” Where I replied “Yes. Of course! It’s a testing conference!” After that he asked the name of the conference. I said “Let’s Test!” I think that it fit well into that conversation.

After the Test Lab, I finally had time to talk with Pradeep Soundararajan. As with many others, I think I first heard about him on Twitter, where I’ve followed him. Lately I’ve been also watching a lot of Oredev videos, and I’ve seen several talks by Pradeep. One interesting talk, is for example a talk How I wish users knew how I help them through context driven testing, where he talked about being a context-driven tester, and the obstacles he has faced. I also saw Gojko Adzic’s talk Sleeping With The Enemy from Oredev 2011. There Pradeep and Gojko were discussing quite intensively, and continued the discussion afterwards on whiteboard. We sat down after Test Lab, because I wanted to hear how the whiteboard discussion went. It was a good story, and I was also interested about it, because I’ll go to Gojko’s Specification by Example workshop this Autumn in Helsinki. Based on everything I saw on Let’s Test, Pradeep seems like man with a big heart. He was constantly asking questions on keynotes and sessions, and also showed that he can walk the walk (brilliant test reporting on Test Lab). I look forward seeing him again.

The night was not over for me on Tuesday. I still managed to discuss with two awesome testers. Those were Jean-Paul Varwijk and Henrik Andersson. I knew Jean-Paul before the conference (had not met him face-to-face though). We had a Skype session, where he helped me with finding Session-Based Exploratory Testing approach for HP Quality Center (Sami Söderblom also helped me a lot). I was able to come up with a workable solution after our discussions. Besides that, we’ve discussed several times on Twitter and I’ve also seen his great webinar, where he answered very thoroughly my question in the end. Jean-Paul talked to me about concurrent testing approach, that they are using currently. I’m not going to open up the details here, but I can say, that I really enjoyed the discussion we had.

Henrik Andersson was one of those testers, that I had heard about often, but never actually discussed with. I had the impression, that basically whole community knew him. From the moment we introduced ourselves, I realized this man has a lot of passion inside of him.  I also learned, that he had asked from reception if I had arrived on Monday. Just to check, that I had actually arrived. Amazing.

As I did not knew him that well, I asked about his background. He told about it very thoroughly, and I enjoyed it from the beginning to the end. I have no idea how long we discussed, but the time just flew. It was a good way to end the conversations on Tuesday (or maybe it was Wednesday already). Luckily I was able to meet Henrik again before I left the conference. Looking forward the next time, we’ll meet.

Wednesday

On Wednesday I was still fortunate to meet people, that I had not met earlier (face-to-face).  First one was Ruud Cox from The Netherlands, whom I met at Mark Micallef’s session. We didn’t have much time to talk, but he recommended me the book about sketchnoting. If you’ve been lately on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed the awesome sketchnotes, that Ruud has made. Few examples of those can be found from his blog. I also heard positive words about Ruud from James Bach. I think James talked about it on his tutorial, but not sure. Nevertheless, Ruud is definitely a tester, that people should know of.

Another tester, that impressed me, was Zeger van Hese, from Belgium. I was blown away by Zeger, when I saw the video of his talk at Oredev 2011. He mentioned on Let’s Test, that his voice was a bit gone on the video, because of being sick. I did not know that, when I was watching the video. I think, that the peaceful voice fit perfectly to that specific talk. It’s one of the most memorable talks I’ve seen of testing. We discussed a bit after his great session, and went through some of the things he had talked about during the session. Like The Noteboard, Coffitivity and of course his talk at Oredev. Zeger is definitely a fresh air in our community. He has a unique kind of artful, and scientific approach to testing.

After Scott Barber’s passionate keynote, it was time for goodbyes. There I met most of the people, that I wrote about here, and also managed to throw glass of water over Jean-Paul (I’m still sorry about that ;). People were saying goodbye, but there was no need for it.  We will meet again in some future conference, and continue discussing about testing on Twitter, Skype, blogs and so on.

It’s about people!

You might wonder (those of you, that are still here), why I didn’t talked about the content of the sessions nearly anything. That’s because, that is only a portion of what Let’s Test was. I wanted you to understand, that this conference was full of unique, skillful and passionate testers, from all over the world. The real magic happened, when these people started discussing after being inspired by the sessions.

By Testers for Testers – Because People Matter

I want to thank from the bottom of my heart, all the people who made Let’s Test 2013 possible. The way in which the whole conference was designed, and executed, was like a masterfully played symphony. You could see how well, the value of conferring was understood. Test Lab was also pure awesomeness. Thanks Martin and James.

Rest of you, I’ll see in the future.

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