CAST 2012 - Day 2

Another day full of learning, fun and meeting amazing people. I have never been around so many smart people where every body is talking about testing. Talking to different people coming from different countries with completely different ways of working but the same goal - how as QAs we can help our organizations and people around us? These conversations have helped me clear my thoughts and re-affirm that the way I am working in my projects is the right approach. 

          Day 2 had more of workshops lined up then day 1, which makes it more difficult to chose which sessions to attend. I was introduced to Anna Royzman the day before as she also is based out of New York and she told about her workshop on Thought Provoking Leadership. I decided to attend her workshop for the first half of the day. In this workshop divided in different groups we used the Empathy maps from Game-Storming principle to understand the stake holder for a product and his needs as a stake holder. 

         We used the travel ads product that we have at IntentMedia to draw the empathy map in our group and we considered the customer who sees the ads as stake holder. I learned about our actual end user here more than I could in more than a year that I have been working at IntentMedia. 

           Post lunch and post the iPad draw(I didn't win :( ) the keynote was delivered by Elisabeth Hendrickson. She talked about the theme of the conference 'Thinking Tester' and I couldn't have agreed to anyone else more than her on the topic that testing is dead. She started by explaining the testing in current perspective as  'Any activity that yields empirical evidence about the extent to which our intentions, our implementation and the actual business needs are aligned'. Most of the people think that testing is just checking but a code is tested when its checked and explored. Exploratory testing is a very important aspect of testing. Therefore a 'Thinking Tester' has following traits: analytical, relentlessly curious, observant, skeptical, empiricist, critical thinking, investigator. The next point that she mentioned was very true with how I think of my work and have been doing it for past 5 years. We in our jobs as tester are not only testers, we play different roles of Product Owner, Programmer, Architect, Project Manager and many more. She closed her talk which I believe explains how the testing community can continue to grow and play that important role in organizations: Testing is not Dead. But the Context continues to evolve, and so do we. Great close to one of the best talks I have ever attended, here are her slides for reference.

            The second part of the day was again a workshop that helped me understand better my work as a service to various stake holders. Lynn Mckee held the workshop on topic Thinking about Testing as a service. During this workshops in our group we brainstormed about what we think Testing and Quality Assurance are. Often the terms that we used daily in our lives are often misunderstood and continue to be ambiguous. Next steps was to understand various stake holders for testing service in a project. These stake holders as we discussed usually are Programmers, Project Manager, Product Owner, Fellow QAs, Share Holders, Customer, Operations and many more. As QAs we directly or indirectly offer our services to each of these stake holders and this makes our job more crucial and important. Lynn has a great website which provides huge resources that would be helpful to any tester to improve his daily activities.

         During CAST welcome note on the first day it was mentioned that in all other conferences evenings are very dull and everybody retards to their rooms but at CAST they have to ask people to go back to their rooms as it was late at night. Through tweets I found that even the first day there were people till 1:30 AM playing testing games. Therefore I decided to stay back the second day to find out more about these testing games and was there past 11 PM. 

We played different games for more than 4 hrs, it was fun and yes there was so much learning from these games.

CAST 2012 - Day 1

The day started with a quick introduction and welcome note. Other conferences that I have attended  the Q&A time is always around 5-10% of session time but at CAST after each talk speakers are given 25 minutes for Q&A. The total time for a session is 75 minutes and if groups wants the discussion can be further extended. This made all the sessions very interactive and led to great discussions.

 The next surprise was facilitators role,  I haven't come across any conference with such an amazing session facilitation. I always thought facilitators job was to just introduce the speaker but today that belief was shattered. At CAST delegates are given three different colored numbered cards which they can use to ask questions. During a session they show a red card if there is an emergency for example speaker cannot be heard or a green card for any explanation but no questions. In the Q&A session when a green card is shown facilitators notes down all the no.s in the order hands are shown and takes the questions in that order. If someone has a question or comment on current thread a yellow card is shown. This helps a lot and conduces a healthy and consistent discussion without any one hijacking the thread and gave everybody a chance to talk in depth about a topic.

  First half of the day I attended the workshop Brainstorming for Testers by Karen Johnson. This was a very interactive workshop with interesting exercises and was based on the Game-storming principles. Game-storming is a set of practices for facilitating innovation in the business world. A facilitator leads a group towards some goal by way of a game, a structured activity that provides scope for thinking freely, even playfully. Karen talked about Beautiful Testing her book, mental locks to overcome as a tester, the importance of notes taking, how mind mapping is helpful in brainstorming process and the importance of asking questions in software testing. We did few exercise which were fun and learning, let's brief these:

1. First exercise we were given a piece of paper and each one wrote whatever they could think of work related or personal stuff. This exercise helped us to align our thoughts and gave a clarity about each topic. I would recommend  doing this whenever you feel you have too much in your head as this definitely helped me clear my mind before other exercises.
2. For second exercise we divided ourselves into groups and had to come up with a testing problem.  After this we were given a deck of testing heuristics. Test heuristics are kind of cheat sheet to use any time during testing, for example : cidtestd = Customers, Information, Developer relations, Team, Equipment & Tools, Schedule, Test Items, Deliverables. James Bach has been advocating use of these mnemonics in testing and recommends writing your own. We used these mnemonics to apply to our testing problem and come up with a prospective solution.
3. The third exercise was using Phoenix Checklist to solve our testing problem. Phoenix Checklist which was originally developed by the CIA is a thinking tool that gives you multiple creative options for problem solving.  Following are a few examples of the questions on the checklist:

           * Why is it necessary to solve the problem?
           * What is the unknown?
           * What is it you don’t yet understand?
           * What isn’t the problem?

Post lunch was the key note on 'Re-Thinking Management…Re-thinking IT' by Tripp Babbitt and few emerging topics. Next session was Foundations of Facilitation and the Tester’s Environment by Chris Blain & Ben Kelly. They talked about how as a testers we can facilitate the team in such a way as to allow the team to solve their own problems. Few points to be considered are:

Positive Environment: Always emphasize on improvements rather than blaming for an incident in the team. Create an environment free of fear and encourage people to try new things without being scared of failures. John Cleese talk on closed and open mode is very helpful in defining the working environment for maximum creativity : 

• Closed Mode: Purposeful, highly productive, but not creative. Good for getting things done. Usually the default Mode at Work. Should be the right approach when you have a specific task with high priority to be completed in a constrained time.
• Open Mode: Playful, curious, fun, humorous, relaxed, contemplative without goals. Relieves the team of pressure and provides opportunity for creativity and innovation.

   Difficulties faced when driving change: Credibility, hierarchy, power dynamics, Apathy and fear. Changing the physical space brings a big change, in our own office having more open space and our little dogs running around relieves the tension and creates fun environment. Now I will get some sleep for the next fun filled day at CAST.

CAST 2012 - learning spree

I was sure this would be the highlight of this year and its getting exciting. I am here at San Jose CA to attend the 'CAST 2012 - The Thinking Tester' which starts tomorrow July 16 2012. 

I expected the Sunday to be a lazy one but it gave a glimpse of what next three days would look like. After breakfast we joined the #TestCoachCamp team for a small session and I am glad we did. Wish I could have attended the full session. We talked about the burn out among testers and how we can help others to get over it. Being a sole QA on a team of around 10 developers I can understand how an unmotivated burn out tester can never deliver best on projects. We discussed various approaches used by other delegates to get people going on their team and I agreed to each of them as I pretty much use them in my work daily. Here are the few that would help any QA on their teams:

1. Most of the times cause of burn out among QAs is repeatedly testing the same piece of software over and over again. Rotating people among various teams and modules on a regular basis will bring new energy and ideas.
2. This one is very prevalent in big teams and organizations. Testing teams during testing files bugs on a piece of code but they never get fixed because the development and product teams think that they are low priority bugs or they are labeled as invalid or not reproducible. This leads to demotivation among testing team and they often don't feel empowered to drive the quality of the software. QAs should be more specific in filing bugs, provide detail steps to reproduce the issue. They should work with product owners in advocating the priority and impact of bugs for a release.
3. Learning new technologies and automation tools & techniques is a great way to regenerate the energy in any engineering team. I have personally tried this and having regular learning session within the team could give a completely new direction to your burned out testing team.
4. Stand ups, tech huddles, retrospectives are the key to success of agile projects. But even the teams with considerably large QA members tend to ignore the issues testing team faces. Providing QA team with testing huddles and QA retrospectives gives a great platform to bring out and resolve the issues test engineers face on daily basis.

I would look forward to reviews of other discussion and learning that can be gained on other topics.

In the evening CAST celebration started with reception. Got to meet other delegates and Speakers, had some interesting discussions. Looking forward to the first day at CAST 2012....