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A new job!!

November 2, 2012 / Huib Schoots / 7 Comments

Yesterday I had my last working day at Rabobank Interntional. I am starting as a test consultant at codecentric (www.codecentric.nl). Unfortunately at Rabobank I can’t do what I want, what I aspire and what I am good at. I was looking for a role as “principal test consultant”. I want to work as a consultant, trainer and coach. Improve people, teams and organizations! My strength lies in sharing the passion for testing, improve, create, learn, teach. I feel comfortable in a role as “technical leader”, where I can and may interfere with the strategic and tactical decisions about testing but also do hands-on stuff to help testers get better. And such a job isn’t available (yet) within Rabo.

Codecentric

Codecentric is a small agile consultancy company in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands there are 12 people, ~~they~~ no wait… we have another 150 people in other countries in Europe. Codecentric is expert in developing and improving IT solutions. We believe in a new way of working, trust, equality, focus, passion, pleasure and expertise to ensure a higher result. Codecentric specializes in agile and Scrum, architecture, performance management/monitoring, Java software development and agile testing. I chose codecentric because they are real experts in everything they do. And they see being an expert as a fundamental choice. They place high demands on each member of the team. Codecentric uses the 4 +1 model work: 1 day per week for the gathering and sharing knowlegde and expertise. I simply love this way of continuously investing in people.

Sabbatical?

In November I will be “in between jobs” or in transition. I like to call it a sabbatical, but I will definitely not be idle the whole month. Next week I will be at EuroStar: looking forward seeing a lot of (international) testing friends and making new ones. Sunday evening there will a gathering in the Novotel where some geek testers get together to do some lightning talks and have fun (and beers). I will be attending the tutorials by Rikard Edgren and Michael D Kelly. I will be track chair on Tuesday afternoon and will do my own talk on Wednesday. Hope to see you there!

November 18 – 22 I will be in Potsdam Germany to attend Agile Testing Days. I will fly in on Saturday to attend Potslightning on Sunday. If you are in town, come and join us! Monday I will do a tutorial on Mind Mapping with Jean-Paul. Hope it will be as awesome as it was at TestNet where we did a half day try-out. The conference program looks awesome, I am sure I will enjoy many great talks. On Thursday I will do my own talk so don’t leave the conference too early 😉

The last week of my “sabbatical” will be full of testing activity as well: hosting a game night at TestNet, doing a testing dojo at Bartosz, having a brainstorm off-site with the TestNet board and do a talk at the Dutch Testing Day about exploratory testing. Hope to see you there as well.

Visualization

October 22, 2012 / Huib Schoots / 0 Comments

This blog post was originally written as an column for www.testnewsonline.com (English) and www.testnieuws.nl (Dutch).

Did you have a chance to see the webinar “Thinking Visually in Software Testing” by Alan Richardson at the EuroStar Virtual Conference May 16^th last? If not I suggest you do that now before you read this column. Also very interesting is the great blog post Fiona Charles has written about this topic with the beautiful title “Breaking the Tyranny of Form”.

Alan explains that simple techniques and tools you can make your thinking visual. It makes your thoughts visible what benefits the feedback to yourself, but also the communication of your thoughts to others. In the webinar Alan shows some simple drawings that made his thought process transparent. The webinar also shows some simple tools that can help you.

Fiona is annoyed by documents where the form is more important than the content. These documents are driving and constraining our work. She explains that templates limit thinking and creativity. In her article she shows some examples of visual representations that helped her in her work.

Text is boring and not very creative. It lets your brain run at half power, only the left part of the brain is put to work. Using images will also put the right part of your brain to work. People remember images easier. In addition, images often impress us more. A text normally needs many pages to describe what a single picture can say. The saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” is really true! A single image can transfer a complex idea fast and easy. Visualization allows us to quickly absorb large amounts of information.

Collaboration through effective communication

Visualization makes your work easier! Through visualization, communication is richer and that makes our work easier. Understanding each other is often the first step to successful collaboration. To clarify the added value of different forms of communication, I often show this picture:

This picture makes clear that communication is enriched with visualization. For who ever bought a new house, you know: graphics were the deciding factor. The plans and artist impressions gave, before only one stone was built, an impression of how the future house was going to look like. The visualization of the house to be built, informed your decision. Could text do the same?

But why do testers still produce so much text in their work? The creation of “traditional” test plans, test reports and test cases is very time consuming. And I think they do not add a lot of value. Have you ever wondered how many people actually read your test plans arising from the use of a 21-page template? And if somebody would have read it, how much useful information is in there for the reader? And what will he ultimately remember?

Mind Maps

Nowadays mind maps are very popular. I use them almost daily for various purposes: insight into situations, problem solving, summarizing, making records, creating plans, develop ideas or report status. I even created a mind map of my resume. The possibilities of mind maps are endless. The theory behind mind maps is fairly simple and making them stimulates the creative side of our brains through visualization.

On the back of a napkin

The drawing of (simple) images can be of great value. In my search for literature on creativity and visualization a few weeks ago, I walked into a book by Dan Roam called “The back of a napkin, Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures“. In this book Dan Roam describes how a simple drawing can help. I’m not a great artist and the simple drawings in this book appealed to me immediately. Ultimately it just requires drawing of simple shapes: lines, rectangles, smiles and stick figures.

His philosophy is that every problem can be solved with a simple drawing. In his book he introduces four steps of visual thinking, five questions that help focus and six ways of seeing. Try it and see if it helps you.

Inspiration

I hope these examples inspired you to try to use more visualization. Try writing a test plan with a mind map or visualize your test strategy and scope with images. Why not put your thoughts on paper using a few sketches? Don’t let the thought that you can’t draw stop you. The creative process is much more important than the final result. Furthermore, you will see that it isn’t really that bad!

Awesome examples
Finally, I want to share some great examples of visualizations, two beautiful animations. The first is Steven Johnson – Where Good Ideas Come From:

And the second is Dan Pink – Drive. The surprising truth about what motivates us:

This Dutch example by Avans Hogeschool also shows how powerful visualization can be:

Gojko Adzic uses simple but very powerful pictures in his presentations that help me understand and remember his message easy.

The last example I like to share is a blog post about visualizing strategy, concept and design which shows some good examples of visualizations and has a few interesting links at the end. Good luck!

DEWT2 was awesome!!

October 9, 2012 / Huib Schoots / 3 Comments

Last Friday (October 5^th) a bunch of software testing nerds and one agile girl gathered in Hotel Bergse Bossen in Driebergen talk about software testing with the central theme “experience reports: implementing context-driven testing”. Ruud published almost all the photos I took on the DEWT website, so I have to write a report in text here. Thanks dude 😉

After some drinks and having dinner we gathered in the conference room called the chalet. I think they call it the chalet because of the humid smell inside because it certainly didn’t look like a chalet.

But never mind, the room was good enough to do a peer conference. Lighting talks were on the program for Friday and Jean-Paul started with a talk in which he asked the question: “Is the context-driven community elitist?”. Jean-Paul sees a lot of tweets and blogs from people in the context-driven community who seem to look down on the rest of the testing community sending the message “look how great we are!”. Is this effective behaviour given the fact that the context-driven community wants to change the way people test, he asked himself.

Joris had a short and clear answer to the first question: “yes!” (the context-driven community is elitist). We had a long discussion that went everywhere but never close to an answer to question about effectiveness and how it can be done better. Never the less it was a valuable and fun discussion. I will blog about this later this year.

We had a great evening/night with home brew beer “Witte Veer”, Belgium beer brought by Zeger and a bottle of Laphroaig quarter cask brought by Joris. Sitting at the fire place a lot of us stayed up until late…

Saturday morning the last DEWTs and guests arrived. With 23 people in the room we had a great group. Our guest were: Markus Gärtner, Ilari Henrik Aegerter, Tony Bruce, Gerard Drijfhout, Pascal Dufour, Rob van Steenbergen, Derk-Jan de Grood, Joep Schuurkes, Bryan Bakker, Lilian Nijboer and Philip-Jan Bosch. The DEWTS: Adrian Canlon, Ruud Cox, Philip Hoeben, Zeger van Hese, Jeanne Hofmans, Joris Meerts, Ray Oei, Jeroen Rosink, Peter Schrijver, Jean-Paul Varwijk and myself.

Peter was our facilitator and for the first time we used k-cards at DEWT to facilitate the discussion. I really like this method, but Lillian didn’t. She had an interesting discussion on twitter with some DEWTs.

Jean-Paul: I like the LAWST format we are using for #DEWT2
Lilian: @Arborosa i don’t. impersonal and inhibits useful discussion
Markus: @llillian @Arborosa What’s the improvement you’re suggesting? 🙂
Lilian: @mgaertne @Arborosa but i am invited and feel i at least have to try it this way
Jean-Paul: @llillian @mgaertne Invite us to an agile event to learn alternatives
Markus: @Arborosa @llillian Funny thing, I would like to introduce more focused-facilitated sessions quite often in agile discussions using k-cards.
Lilian: @mgaertne @Arborosa different ppl prefer different things 🙂

Ilari kicked of with a presentation about the introduction of context-driven testing at eBay. He had two very interesting ideas: the first is “Monday Morning Suggestion” a short email to his team with tips, tricks or interesting links. The second was that he supports his team in getting better and learning by paying for their books and conference visits. Great stuff!

Second was Markus Gärtner with a story about him coaching a colleague to become a better tester and more context-driven. He talked about his lessons learned coaching where teaching gradually turned into coaching. He also gave some insight in the transpection sessions he did using the socratic method.

The third presentation was about changing people to become more context-driven by Ray Oei. An interesting discussion developed about how to get people to change. We focus too much on the people who do not want to change instead of working with the people who do want to change. Pascal asked an interesting question which I put on twitter: “If all testers become context-driven overnight, are we happy?” James Bach replied: “Yes, we are happy if all testers become CDT” and “We are happy if all testers take seriously the world around them, and how it works, and dump authoritarianism”. To me it doesn’t really matters, I do hope that more people become CDT, but I prefer good software testing no matter how them call it.

After the discussion Joris said he was attending the wrong peer conference since he expected a lot of discussion about testing instead of what he calls “people management”. An interesting question, but isn’t testing also a lot about people? Just an hour late we went for lunch and a walk in a wet forest. After the walk the group photo was taken.

The forth talk was by Ruud Cox who talked about testing in a medical environment. He described the way he has been working. He and his colleague tester use exploratory testing to learn and explore. Scripted testing was used to do the checking. Ruud explained that exploratory testing fits very well in an R&D environment. After his talk we had an interesting discussion about auditors and their role in testing.

Around 16:00 it was my turn to do my talk about implementing context-driven testing within Rabobank. I did a short version of the talk I will do at EuroStar in November telling about the challenges we had and what we did to change our context. What did we do? What worked and what didn’t? Some interesting questions were asked. And we had a nice discussion about the personal side of becoming more context-driven where Joep explained how he became context-driven. The first stage was being interested and he went looking for a book. The second stage took him over a year where he struggled with the stuff he learned at RST and trying to adapt his way of working. The third and last stage is where he doesn’t need anything anymore because he will always find a way to make things work.

After my talk and the discussion the day ended. We did a quick round to discuss our experiences and thanked the people for attending, organizing and facilitating. Our agile girl still doesn’t know what to think about the facilitation with the k-cards, she obviously had to get used to discussing with the cards. I am curious how she thinks about them when she had the chance to think about it some more.

All together I had a great time. Pity we didn’t play the Kanban game on Friday. But I hope Derk-Jan will give me another chance at the game night at TestNet in November. Thanks all for the awesome weekend!!

DEWT3 is already being planned for April 20 and 21 next year and James Bach will attend. Let me know if you are interested in joining us in April 2013. The topic hasn’t been decided yet, but if you have great ideas please share them.

Standing left to right: Ray Oei, Jean-Paul Varwijk, Adrian Canlon, Markus Gärtner, Ruud Cox, Joris Meerts, Pascal Dufour, Philip Hoeben, Gerard Drijfhout, Bryan Bakker, Derk Jan de Grood, Joep Schuurkes, Lilian Nijboer, Philip-Jan Bosch, Jeroen Rosink, Jeanne Hofmans
Kneeling left to right: Tony Bruce, Zeger van Hese, Ilari Henrik Aegerter, Huib Schoots, Peter Simon Schrijver

15 test bloggers you haven’t heard about, but you should…

July 9, 2012 / Huib Schoots / 5 Comments

Everybody knows about James Bach, Michael Bolton, Lisa Crispin, Elisabeth Hendrickson, Gojko Adzic and other famous test bloggers. If not, this is a serious wake up call: WAKE UP! Open your eyes and start reading some of these excellent blogs about testing. But these are many other blogs on testing worthwhile reading. I have a large list of blogs by colleagues which I read regularly. I went through this list and selected these fairly unknown bloggers for you. I invite you to read their blogs, comment on them and come back often. As you can see it is an international community!

1. Australia: David Greenlees – Martial Tester

David is from down under and I “know” him form the Miagi-Do School of software testing. He has a goal in his testing life to get mentioned on the commendations list by James Bach. A great goal and while typing this and reading through the list, I want to get mentioned in that list too!

2. Belgium: Zeger van Hese – Testsidestory

Fellow DEWT, test friend and honorary Dutch. Did I mention that Zeger is program chair for EuroStar 2012? How can a EuroStar program chair be so unknown while is a) as great and fun guy to hang out with and b) a great tester who has done awesome presentations and writes great blog posts? “On being context-driven” and “Finding Porcini” are some of the great posts I like.

3. Canada: Iain McCowatt – Exploring Uncertainty

Iain was one of the trainers when I took BBST foundations last April and I started to read his blog. He did a great series on regression testing and writes well thought blog posts. Can anyone tell me how to pronounce his name?

4. Finland: Pekka Marjamäki – How do I Test

Pekka is an interesting guy. I “met” him via twitter and a while later I found his blog. Interesting stuff! Even Rex Black has commented recently on one of his posts. I still have to talk to him about Testing with the stars. Read about it on his blog. Very interesting concept.

5. Japan: Ben Kelly – Testjutsu

I met Ben in Sweden at Let’s Test in 2012 where he did a great presentation called The Testing Death. Ben is a thoughtful person of no so many words but still fun the hang around with. Give his blog a read. He isn’t very active recently but you still can find some jewels there.

6. Netherlands: Jean-Paul Varwijk – The wondrous world of software testing

He cannot be absent in this list. My fellow DEWT and testing buddy at work. Jean-Paul has an impressive track record the last year: he managed to get a black belt at the Miagi-Do School of software testing while doing his introduction challenge (which is very rare), he impressed James Bach with his answer to a challenge given to him over dinner and he does a couple of national and international talks on big testing conference all over Europe this year. A guy to keep an eye on…

7. Netherlands: Joep Schuurkens – The testing curve

I met Joep at Let’s Test conference in Sweden and found out he is actually Belgium 😉 Joep is context-driven and writes about that on his blog, his posts on The Seven Basic Principles of the context-driven school are great! Joep is also a great guy to hang out with (at least on a conference he is).

8. Romania: Jari Laakso – Software Testimonies

Jari is hyperactive on twitter and loves puzzles! He creates his own very challenging puzzles and blogs about that. Find him on skype and he will have you puzzling for at least a day. This guys like to get challenged, read this post about “18 Testing Challenges from Santhosh Tuppad”.

9. Scotland: Darren McMillan – Better Testing

Darren is been around quite a while and isn’t very active lately. But he is the king of mind mapping in testing. His blog post “Mind Mapping 101” has 53 comments and is awesome, just like “Essential mind mapping: Rapid test design”. If you want to do something with mind mapping come to my tutorial on Agile Testing days OR read Darren’s blog. He by the way also writes about other topics.

10. Sweden: Johan Jonasson – Testing Thoughts

Not a very original name for a blog since Shmuel Gershon uses the same name for his great blog. [Update: Johan changed the name to: “Let’s talk testing”]. Johan is one of the people behind Let’s Test and after reading all the posts on the conference he must have thought he is able to do that too, well have a look yourself. I like his post on “Thinking Visually” very much.

11. Sweden: Rikard Edgren, Henrik Emilsson and Martin Jansson – Thoughts form the Test Eye

These gentlemen were also highly involved in Let’s Test and are blogging for some time now. They get help from Torbjörn Ryber and Henrik Andersson who also write interesting stuff. This blog is stuffed with great posts, hours of interesting reading guaranteed.

BTW: download the two free books written by Rikard and Torbjörn! Both highly recommended!!

12. Sweden: Simon Morley – The Tester’s Headache

Simon has a blog since 2009 and I am reading his stuff since a year or maybe a little more. I met him at Agile Testing Days last year and had some great conversations with him. Simon has a sharp mind and that shows in his writings…

13. Switzerland: Ilari Henrik Aegerter – ilari.com

Ilari lives in Switzerland and does online coaching like James and Anne-Marie and he does a great job. Ilari is fun and writes interesting stuff. Have you answered his question in the post “Major Consensus Narrative, Asking Supposedly Hyper-Smart Questions and Being Context-Driven” already?

14. UK: Duncan Nisbet – Bespoke Testing

I met Duncan at Let’s Test in Sweden last May but before that we did BBST together and we are both in Miago-Do. Duncan is a polar bear: when everybody was cold in Sweden and was wearing jackets and sweaters, Duncan still walked around in shorts and on flip-flops. He wrote a nice post about working together on-line: “Collaboration In Testing”

15. UK: Tony Bruce – Have you ever danced with the tester?

I met Tony last year at Test Bash and over dinner I found out he is a great guy. Cheerful, subtle and fun. Tony is the driving force behind the test gatherings in the UK. Meetups of testers in a bar with short talks and lots of beer! One of his last post is great: “Which do you have? A job or a career?”

Adaptability vs Context-Driven

June 29, 2012 / Huib Schoots / 35 Comments

Last week Rik Marselis send me an email pointing me to an article with the title “The adaptability of a perceptive tester”. He added: “Have you read this article? Should appeal to you!”. The article is written by a couple of Dutch (Sogeti) testers. And they, so the introduction tells me, get together once in a while to discuss the profession of testing and quality assurance. This time they discussed some remarkable examples of their experience that perceptive testers (who are aware of the specific situation they’re in) adapt their approach to fit the specific needs.

I replied to Rik with the following email:

Hey Rik,

Nice article, I had already seen it. But adaptive or perceptive is not context-driven. I also totally disagree with the conclusion:
“Together we concluded that although TMap NEXT was introduced some six years ago it still has a solid foundation for any testing project since the essence of adaptiveness makes sure that any perceptive tester can collaborate in doing the right things at the right moment in any project and ensure that the proper quality is delivered to solve the problem of the stakeholders.”

TMap Next contains a number of dogmas (or rather is based on a number of dogmas) like: testing can be scheduled, the number of test cases is predictable, content of a test case is predictable, sequence of process, etc.
Therefore I think TMap Next is not usable in every situation. At least not effectively and efficiently. Being adaptive is good, but I can imagine situations that TMap Next has to be adjusted rigorously that the result is no longer recognizable as TMap. In addition: TMap Next says that ET is a technique: a good example of another dogma. And it shows me that TMap is not about testing but about a process and deliverables … Maybe I should write a blog about this.

Regards,
Huib

Rik replied with this email:

Hi Huib,

We really need to reserve some time to discuss this from different sides because some things that you say I totally disagree with. A conscious tester can handle any situation with TMap. I think whether ET is a technique or approach is really a non-discussion. TMap calls it a technique so you can approach testing in different ways in different situations. And since TMap itself is a method you cannot call ET a method too.

I think Context-driven means you choose your approach depending on the situation.
I think Adaptive means you choose your approach depending on the situation.

Perceptive means conscious, as you are aware of the situation, you can choose an appropriate approach. Well, it is worth discussing.

Regards,
Rik

Okay, so let’s discuss!

Exploratory testing
Let’s start with the ET discussion. What does TMap say about this? ET is a test design technique. And the definition of a test design technique (on page 579 of the book “TMap Next for result driven testing”): “a test design technique is a standard method to derive, from a specific test basis, test cases that realise a specific coverage”. Test cases are described on page 583 of the same book: “a test case must therefore contain all of the ingredients to cause that system behaviour and determine wheter or not is it correct … Therefore the following elements must be recognisable in EVERY test case regardless of the test design technique is used: Initial situaion, actions, predicted result”.

Let’s connect the dots: ET is called a test design technique. A test design technique is defined as: a method used to derive test cases. But ET doesn’t use test cases, not in the way TMap defines them. It can, but most of the time it doesn’t… Mmm, an inconsistency with image, a claim, expectations, the product, statues & standards. I would say: a blinking red zero! Or in other words, there /is/ something wrong here!

What is Exploratory Testing? Paul Carvalho wrote an excellent blog post simply titled “What is Exploratory Testing?” on this topic and I suggest people to read this if they what to understand what ET is. Elisabeth Hendrickson says: “Exploratory Testing is simultaneously learning about the system while designing and executing tests, using feedback from the last test to inform the next.”

Michael Bolton and the context-driven school like to define it as: “a style of software testing that emphasizes the personal freedom and responsibility of the individual tester to optimize the quality of his or her work by treating test design, test execution, test interpretation, and test-related learning as mutually supportive activities that continue in parallel throughout the project.”. Michael has a collection of interesting resources about ET and it can be found here.

So Rik, your argument “since TMap itself is a method you cannot call ET a method too” is total bullshit! It sounds to me as “there is only one God…”.

Context-driven testing
Don’t get me wrong, being adaptive and perceptive is great, but that doesn’t make testing context-driven. A square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not a square! Please have a look at the context-driven testing website by Cem Kaner. Also read the text of the key note “Context-Driven Testing” Michael Bolton gave last year at CAST 2011. In his story you will see that adaptive (paragraph 4.3.4) is only a part of being context-driven. I admit, it is not easy to really comprehend context-driven testing.

Do you think it was TMap Next that was the common success factor in the stories shared in the article… I doubt it!

Basic training for software testers must change

June 18, 2012 / Huib Schoots / 21 Comments

This blog post was originally written as an column for www.testnewsonline.com (English) and www.testnieuws.nl (Dutch).

On this blog I recently wrote about my meeting with James Bach with the provocative title: “What they teach us in TMap Class and why it is wrong“. Mid July I go to San Jose for the CAST conference. During the weekend preceding I participate in Test Coach Camp. The title of the post is the title of a proposal that I submitted to discuss at Test Coach Camp.

In the past I have been a trainer for quite a few ISTQB and TMAP courses. The groups attending the training were often a mix of inexperienced and experienced testers. The courses cover topics like: the reason for testing, what is testing, the (fundamental) processes, the products that testers create, test levels, test techniques, etc. In these three-day courses all exercises are done on paper. Throughout the whole training not once actual software is tested!? I wonder if courses for developers exist where no single line of code is written.

In San Jose at Test Coach Camp I want to discuss the approach of these courses with my peers. How can we improve them? I feel these courses are not designed to prepare testers to test well. Let alone to encourage testers to become excellent in their craft.

During my dinner with James, I asked him what he would do if he would train novices to become good testers. He replied that he would let them test some software from the start. He would certainly not start with lectures on processes, test definitions and vocabulary. During a session the student will (unknowingly) use several techniques that will be named and can be further explained when stumbled upon. A beautiful exploratory approach I would like to try myself: learning by doing! But there are many more opportunities to improve testing courses. People learn by making mistakes, by trying new things. Testing is much more about skills than about knowledge. Imagine a carpenter doing a basic training. His training will mainly consist of exercises! My neighbour is doing a course to become furniture maker. She is learning the craft by many hours of practice creating work pieces. Practice is the biggest part of her training!

One of the comments on my blog opposed to the suggestion by James Bach. Peter says: “I have been both a tester and trainer in ISTQB and TMap. Yes we can make testing fun but without a method that testing has no structure and more importantly has no measurable completion. How will those new people on “more practical” course know when they have finished? What tests did they do? What did they forget? What defect types did they target? Which ones did they not look for? What is the risk to the system? My view after 40 years as a developer and tester is that this idea might be fun but is not just WRONG but so dangerously wrong that I am sad that no one else has seen it.”

What do you think?

Let’s Test 2012: an awesome conference! – Part 4

June 1, 2012 / Huib Schoots / 1 Comment

Wednesday 9^th: Let’s Test day 3: sessions

Keynote Scott Barber

Last day of this awesome conference. Because we went to bed quite late (or early, it depends how you look at it), I was a bit hungover. But the adrenalin for my upcoming talk made my hangover disappear unbelievable quickly. The day started with a keynote by Scott Barber titled “Testing Missions in Context From Checking To Assessment”. I had no clue of where this talk would bring us but the title intrigued me. Scott started with a fun incoming message where he was asked to test a website and all discrepancies in production would be blamed on him. The message ended with the rhetorical question: “do you accept this mission?”. Scott talked about missions and tasks and he gave some nice examples using his military history. His advice: “always look at the mission two command levels up”. At the end of his talk he presented his new “Software System Readiness Assessment” and the Software System Assessment Report Card. I think I like his model, but I have to give it some more thought.

Scott Barber - Testing Missions in Context From Checking To Assessment

Scott relaxed on a bar stool on stage

Sessions

On Wednesday there were only 2 sessions because there was also a second keynote in the afternoon. I went to Michael Albrechts talk “from Good to Great with xBTM”. Michael talked about Session and Thread based test management. Both are very good, but combined they are great, he claims. He showed the tool SBTExecute. I haven’t had the chance to try it yet, but it looks promising. His talked showed how SBTM and TBTM can be combined using mind maps and how this approach can be used in agile.

My talk “So you think you can test?” was planned in the second session right after lunch. The rooms was packed and Zeger van Hese (did I mention that he is program chair of EuroStar 2012?) was facilitating the session. What could go wrong? After my talk there was a nice Open Season with some great questions. Thanks all for attending and participating, thank Zeger for facilitating. I hope everybody enjoyed my talk as much as I did.

Michael Albrecht - From Good to Great with xBTM	Look who's talking
So you think you can test? (Photo: Zeger van Hese)

Keynote Julian Harty

Julian did a magnificent keynote titled “Open Sourcing Testing”. He called testers to action to share their stuff with others so all can benefit, learn and eventually become better testers. One of his slides said: Ask “what you I share?” that doesn’t risk “too much”. And I think he is right. We should share more and we should be more open about what we do. Sure there is a lot of stuff which is too privacy-sensitive to share, but why should we reinvent the wheel in every organisation or project? By sharing we can also learn faster…

Julian Harty - Open Sourcing Testing

The End: Organisors on stage saying goodbye

The end…

Here you find all the presentations and lots of other blogs about Let’s Test 2012. I had a wonderful time, met loads of great people and learned a lot. So I think I can truly say: it was an awesome conference. I already registered for Let’s Test 2013 … Count down has begun. See you there? Or if you can’t wait so long: maybe we meet in San Jose at CAST 2012 in a couple of weeks? This promises to be an awesome conference as well!

People leaving, taxis driving on and off	My physical take aways: Julian, Rikard, Torbjörn and Scott: thanks!

Let’s Test 2012: an awesome conference! – Part 3

May 28, 2012 / Huib Schoots / 0 Comments

Tuesday 8^th May: Let’s Test day 2: Sessions

Keynote Rob Sabourin

After a “tired” but funny introduction by Paul “Hungover” Holland, Rob Sabourin climbed the stage to do a great keynote titled “Elevator Parable” in which he told a story about a conversation he overhead in the elevator. The central thing is his talk was a bug from this conversation. Rob entertained the audience with voice mail messages from famous testers like James Bach and Rex Black. After every message the audience was asked to triage the bug. A very entertaining and interesting talk. Duncan has written a much more comprehensive blog post about this talk and you can find it here.

Paul "hungover" Holland	Rob Sabourin (photo by Anders Dinsen)
Rob Sabourin – Elevator Parable

Sessions

After the keynote I went to four really good sessions:

Markus Gärtner – “Charter your tests”: in which we worked in small groups to create charters to test an application of our choice. A nice “dojo” style exercise with some good discussions in the retrospective part.
Rikard Edgren – “Curing Our Binary Disease”: a great presentation in which Rikard warns us for the Binary Disease. A serious disease with four symptoms: pass/fail addiction, coverage obsession, metrics tumor and sick test techniques.
Louise Perold – “Tales from the financial testing trenches”: for me, working for a bank, this case study was very interesting. She shared her experiences testing context-driven in the financial domain: some topics she covered were low-tech dashboard, reporting with mind maps, learning & motivation, effect mapping and debriefing.
Anne-Marie Charrett – “Coaching Testers”: in this session Anne-Marie did a short introduction presentation of the coaching model she and James Bach have developed. After that she did a short coaching session via skype on the beamer to show how it works. Next the group was invited to coach 5 anonymous testers via skype on the laptops in the back of the room. The exercise was fun and it was interesting to see how a coaching session via skype evolves. David was one of the testers coached, read his write-up.

Markus Gärtner - Charter your tests	Working in groups in Markus’ session
Sharing and discussing results	Some Results and flip chart art
Lunch Outside (who is the person in the middle?)	Rikard Edgren - Curing Our Binary Disease
Louise Perold - Tales from the financial testing trenches	Anne-Marie Charrett - Coaching Testers
Live coaching testers

Evening fun

Again the evening brought lots of fun: Let’s Test had an amazing evening program including guided art and nature tours, sports, open space, lighting talks, competitions in the test lab, quizzes and … sponsored free beer! Great to have all attendees of the conference present at the same venue all night. This creates a wonderful ambiance with fun, good conversations and you meet a lot of interesting people.

Xbox ski fun	Let's Try
Test Lab Heroes	The Test Lab packed
Ideal game for testers: Set!	Sun comes up, time to go to bed!

Let’s Test 2012: an awesome conference! – Part 2

May 18, 2012 / Huib Schoots / 0 Comments

Monday May 7^th: 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

Let’s Test 2012: an awesome conference! – Part 1

May 14, 2012 / Huib Schoots / 1 Comment

The world of software testing is changing and Context-driven testing (CDT) is upcoming. In the USA it is better known and more applied than with us in Europe. Overseas in the USA the Association for Software Testing (AST) is fairly context-driven. They organize a conference called CAST every year where CDT is one of the main topics. In 2011 the theme of the whole conference was context-driven testing. People like Cem Kaner, Michael Bolton and James Bach travel the world to learn others about CDT. They encourage others to create peer workshops like DEWT in the Netherlands, SWET in Sweden and GATE in Germany. These peer workshops help spread the word about CDT. At other conferences CDT gets some attention, but that isn’t enough… In the summer of 2011 five brave gentlemen from Sweden decided to create something beautiful: a context-driven conference in Europe! Let’s Test was born. I am very pleased to be one of the approx. 140 people who took part in the first Let’s Test ever. I feel very honoured that I was part of the totally excellent line-up of speakers that spoke there.

Me and Peter (aka Simon) Schrijver arrived at Runö in Åkersberga early Sunday morning after picking up Fiona Charles at her hotel in Stockholm. Here we met the organisers of the conference: Johan Jonasson, Hendrik Andersson, Ola Hyltén, Torbjörn Ryber and Hendrik Emilsson. The venue is beautiful!

The venue: Runö – Möten & Events

Hotel buildings 1 and 2	Keynote hall (l) and main building (r)
My Room	The view
More view	The garden

Sunday May 6^th: LTWET (LEWT goes Sweden / Let’s LEWT)

After a quick breakfast I joined a LEWT-style peer workshop organized by James Lyndsay. Peter joined the people who were trained as facilitators for the Let’s Test conference by Paul Holland. Later that morning some of them would join the peer workshop. The theme of the peer workshop was “design” and we started with a small group: James Lyndsay, Desi (James’ wife), Neil Thompson, Fiona Charles and me. Later Paul Holland, Ilari Aegerter, Ben Kelly, Torbjörn Ryber, Rikard Edgren, Peter/Simon Schrijver and Simon Morley joined.

Dot voting monkeys	Great topics
Fiona, Paul and Ilari	Torbjörn and Peter/Simon
Desi, Simon and Rikard	James, Ben and Neil
Neil on relation between analysis and design	Rikard on Charisma Testing
Simon on Experimental design