A few of you will know that we (well, Stephen Mounsey, Nick
Judge, Fredrik Seiness, Phil Hargreaves et al did all the hard work, I just flounced
in and presented a workshop) have recently given birth to the Leeds Testing Community unConference. All conferences start from an acorn, a twinkle in the eye, and
this was no exception. I didn’t want to
let it pass without blogging on it, as I believe it to be the beginning of something
big! There is a real thirst for this kind of event in Leeds, a thriving tech
city with loads going on.
A quick whistle-stop tour of my highlights:
- Uno – Laurence Wood presented on his agile heroes, including my close testing and monitoring pal Gwen Diagram. I will not say the ‘D’ word. Also, on one to one ratios of developers to product owners (pinch me), a very strong start from a great speaker.
- Dos – My mobile testing workshop, entitled ‘Extending your testing senses.’ Despite being the only person currently testing in a mobile context in the room, everyone really got stuck in to using the on device Android Developer Tools. Testing search functions on popular networks using CPU monitoring, layout tools and many more. I heard a lot of heartening ‘I didn’t even know my phone did that’ type of comments. Even better the same tools were used in the afternoon workshop. Joy.
- Tres – Stephen Mounsey and sketch noting was a great interactive session, I felt a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction as my barely legible doodles became a coherent map of the session. Or something like that. The key learning was turning previously dreaded meetings into something engaging and being present. With a tangible output at the end of it.
- Cuatro – An honourable mention for my good friend Clem Pickering, whose presentation of the Palchinsky Principles really resonated with me, with strong threads of experimentation and viewing failure as learning. Slide of the day was a surprising number on how Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne share a surprising number of characteristics, showing just how much perspective impacts your assumptions while testing.
All that remains is a massive thank you to the organisers,
hosts (Callcredit Information Group, who I can testify are an extremely
engaging organisation for those in software development) and my fellow
speakers.
Isn’t it exciting to be in at the beginning of something
awesome?
Comments
Post a Comment