TestSverige UnConference 2018

So this weekend I attended TestSverige UnConference 2018 among with a group of other members. I’ve attended a few unconferences before (Agila Sverige as one example) but this was the first time with a really limited allowed number of attendees.

In the end we were 10 eager participants which might sound small but allowed for really passionate discussions (that might have spilled into dinner, after dinner and breakfast..)

First draft of schedule gave us 2 tracks with 2 sessions of 30 min between each bigger break but in the spirit of agile we decided only to plan until the first fika (coffee break) and then plan until lunch, then until next break and so on. After each session we had a quick recap from each group and then you chose your next session. Choosing which one to join was sometime painful as you might want to attend both…

Topics chosen were:

Model based testing

What does a test coach do?

The lone tester in an agile team

Test Culture vs. strategy

Drunk hamster deploy

Agent based testing

Catastrophic failures

Security testing

Motivation – yours and others

AI and testing

Maintainable tests

Deliberate practise

The future of TestSverige

Retro

I had brought my Moving motivators so I was glad to get a chance to discuss motivations. We each prioritized the cards and discussed each persons choices. An interesting point made was that we interpreted the terms really differently, which is the point of the generalized words and descriptions.

I encourage everyone to Think about their own motivations and be open to the fact that others probably value other things and see your movitations in another light.

Göran Bakken brought a stack of interesting books, Explore it! is one of my personal favourites

My main takeaways from the discussions are:

– Combining model-based, agent-based and AI/Machine Learning is a really interesting possible future that should be investigated.

– Given the right people, environments and prerequisites you could have an application without technical debt and have enough faith to be able to let a drunk hamster deploy your code

– Communication is key. Communicate what you can do but also what you can’t.

– Most testers could with a bit effort learn to do basic security testing that a lot of us Think are really complicated and require deep technical knowledge. There are a lot of cool tools out there to try and even with just bug magnet or big list of naughty string you could do a lot more than nothing.

-Maintainability if crucial but requires a good strategy, testing on the right level, working together in the team on _all_ test levels and re-using good useful components/objects/modules/fixtures (call it whatever works in your context!)

But, as always: The best part is meeting other testers. Even though the schedule ended around 18 o’clock, the discussions and exchange of knowledge continued into the evening and even breakfast.

Met people I knew from before, had heard of and people completely new to me and I hope I get to meet each and everyone again.

Thank you all for being o generous with yourselves!

See you next time and don’t be strangers, reach out whenever you want.