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.
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