Monday May 7th: Let’s Test Tutorial day

Keynote Michael Bolton
Ola opened the conference officially with this great song by one of my favorite bands. When the music started I looked around the grand hall to see where they had hidden the canons… you never know.

And we rocked! The first keynote was Michael Bolton, who did a great talk “If it is not context-driven, you can’t do it here”. Reminding us in one of his first slides that the title is ironic. See the live blog by Markus Gärtner for a full report on this great talk. There were a lot of tweets during the talk like these: “Adopt or adapt a clients context is part of the paradox of being a context driven tester”, “Mature people don’t try to get rid of failure, they manage it” and “Testers are in the business of reducing damaging certainty”. Meike Mertsch created some awesome drawings to capture the opening and keynote. This reminds me that I want to do the same course Markus and Meike did…

The event hall filling up

Michael Bolton – If it’s not CD you can’t do it here!

Live blogging by @MeikeMertsch

Tutorial Fiona Charles
After the keynote it was tutorial time and I joined Fiona Charles on the topic : “test leadership”. A nice big group of 25-30 people sat in a circle and we introduced ourselves shortly and explained the motivation to be in this tutorial. I always enjoy the variety of reasons why people chose a specific session. During the day we did a couple of interesting exercises and debriefed them quite extensive. In one of the exercises was, we were decided in two groups. Each group had to create a leadership challenge for the other group in 45 minutes. The other group would get 45 minutes to solve it. After creating the challenges, they we both solved by the groups. The interesting thing in these exercises is while working on the exercises, you are also the subject of the exercises and you are aware of that fact. Got some interesting insides and take-aways to chew on.

Fiona and some attendees


The tutorial group

More tutotial attendees


Working in groups

Teamwork during exercise

More discussion

Results drawn by Markus

Results in a mind map

An evening in the Test Lab
After a beautiful diner it was time for the evening program. There was so much to do but I chose the test lab, since I like actual testing with my peers on these occasions. We did a group exercise planning collaborative with corkboard.me as planning tool. Here I noticed the common problem if people all have their own device: everybody is too much focussed on what they are doing and not really collaborating. A lot of lessons and a good experience again, so cheers to James and Martin who organized the lab here. The rest of the evening we spend having a couple of beers and discussing al kinds of test and non-test related topics.

Working with corkboard


Discussion and concentration

A lot of hard work