Reflections of XING QA @ Testbash Germany 2017
What is Testbash?
Testbash is a conference theme for testers. It is created and run by "Ministry of Testing", a UK based organisation, which also hosts blogs, videos and other testing related information.
Testbash is a single track, single day conference. That means no parallel sessions and gives every attendee an opportunity to attend all the talks.
In October 2017, they held the first German based Testbash, in Munich.
Intro from the editor
Quite some testers from XING attended Testbash Germany ("Oktobertest") and I thought, it would be a nice idea to collate their individual experience and summarize it in this article.
I have kept individual experience reports in their original spirit and just made editorial updates where needed. -- Maik Nogens
Feedback from XING colleagues
1) Lisa Persson, Agile Tester at XING Events GmbH München, Germany
(Lisa has written an interesting and elaborated article, you can read it here.)
2) Julia Nosovskaya, Agile Tester at XING Mobile Platform and Partners
Testbash in Munich this October was my first testing related conference in Germany. I was very excited to visit it and was looking forward to be there.
I was pleasantly surprised how informal and friendly the atmosphere was there… There were no strict rules or tight schedules, it was more like gathering of people who are fans of what they do and who are eager to share their experience.
The main focus of the conference was not on technological aspects and workshops, but on strategies of testing as a whole, approaches, stories of failure and success from their teams and what they are doing on the day-to-day basis.
It was also an option to skip some irrelevant speeches and to devote time for making new contacts and to speak directly to the attendees in another room.
3) Volodymyr Iakymenko, QA Engineer at XING Mobile Platform and Partners
This was my first TestBash experience which was nicely aligned with Octoberfest celebration and TestBash hosted in Germany. The organizational team did a great job by choosing a good location and right timing. The venue itself was quite a charming place, which had all of those ancient statues and nicely painted walls that looked like they convey some history of the past.
When I entered the building I ended up in entrance hall that was filled with people chatting with each other and everyone seemed like they were deeply engaged in discussions, which I learned later was about the talks that were given by the first two speakers.
It was a very pleasant discovery to see that people from the Testing community are so active and passionate about testing topics and open to express their opinions about conference talks as well as share their personal “on-field” experience and struggles they faced during their testing career.
The conference speakers were pretty diverse in terms of their fields of expertise and cultural background. One of the most memorable talks for me was #NoEstimates from Vasco Duarte, which went about very significant topic for every software development team - estimates :-) .
The speaker shared how he approaches this topic in a way that guarantees successful outcome of the project in a form of deliverable software in the timely manner.
Very interesting talk for me was a story called “Tester Exploring Developer Land”. Lisi Hocke shared her story how she started whole-team approach to testing in which she tried to engage every team member to be conscious about product quality. She also shared her approach to tackling the problem when a single person possess the knowledge about certain domain area and when such person leaves the company it creates a knowledge gap.
In a nutshell she set up knowledge sharing and code review sessions that provided knowledge distribution among all team members.
Almost forgot to mention about “99 second talks” which, from what I understand, is kind of a tradition of the conference. It was very challenging activity I must say and really admire people who were brave enough to step up and push yourself to do it.
In short, the participants have to choose a topic he/she wants to talk about and then come to the stage and share it with audience within 99 seconds.
Finishing my review I want to say that it was very good experience and quality time. I got a chance to connect with a lot of like-minded people through personal interaction, which would be hard to do otherwise. I definitely want to join other TestBash Conferences in the future.
Conclusion
All in all, it has been great experience to attend some interesting conference like TestBash together with a passionate bunch from work. It has been a great means in my experience to have an open exchange around topics presented in the conference and discuss them with your colleagues in context of your workplace. I am happy how it went for us; together. And I look forward to attend conferences in groups more often.
