Independent, Punk, Leeds Testing Atelier IV

On Tuesday 9th May 2017, we did it again, the fourth iteration of the Testing Atelier rocked the mighty city of Leeds. 

We try to do things a little different. 

Our venue Wharf Chambers is different, a community run venue rather than stuffy conference halls or meeting rooms. We wanted to present a different type of event too as many testing conferences are mainly testers talking about testing that testers do. We wanted to show testing as an activity though, something that all roles do in their own way and how those fit together. To this end, we sourced speakers, workshop facilitators and panelists from loads of roles, developers, ops, build engineers, product all contributed. In fact we had pretty much a 50/50 split between testers and other roles. Winning.

#Testatelier #Leeds The testers have taken over the 3 ways of #DevOps! Here's the third way... pic.twitter.com/V95nTLzQpj

— AlexC (@smileandeliver) May 9, 2017

As well as having more from all those roles who have a stake in testing as an activity, we had:

• More focus on understanding issues that are changing our testing lives, including DevOps and Continuous Delivery techniques, in order to realise that testing is often enriched by new patterns for software development. 
• More gender diversity than before, 40% of speakers, workshop facilitators and panelists identified as female, an improvement on 20% for Atelier III. More diversity, more viewpoints, more understanding, better relationships, better decisions and different thinking.
• More sponsors enabling us to do more for our attendees, more media (thanks to Codera for helping us out) and more swag (again, thanks to Skelton Thatcher and Ministry of Testing). Infinity Works, Ten10 and Chris Chant kept the bar stocked and bellies full of pizza, a crucial part of the day. 

Anyway, I think this tweet summed up my feelings for the day, quite nicely:

Home after bingeing on the excellent #TestAtelier & @AgileYorkshire today. Proud to be part of t'vibrant #Leeds software delivery community.

— Neil McLaughlin (@neilbmclaughlin) May 9, 2017

Leeds continues to flourish as a technology city and the Atelier is a big part of that. We'll be back later this year, better than ever.