Australian Testing Days – Day 1

What a day we had at the #ATD2K16, the inaugural Australian Testing Days Conference! A day filled with lot of learning, community and connecting with fellow testers.

The day started with the Keynote from Michael Bolton on “The Rapid Software Testing Guide to What You Meant to Say”. Michael had delivered this talk earlier at TestBash 2015 and I had seen the videos, but watching it first hand is an experience in itself. There was lot of fun and wisdom in his presentation and it stressed on the importance of communication, Testing vs Checking, Testers getting out of the QA business and so on.

Next up, was the talk from Michelle Cross on “Transformation of a QA Department”. Hard to believe that it was Michelle’s first conference talk, as she presented it in her usual effortless ease ????. The talk was about her attempt to integrate context driven testing to her team, the learnings and the challenges of a cross cultural team. Great insight and research and she has really done a wonderful job, we could see that from the team snaps she shared in the presentation.

Catherine Karena gave a fantastic account of raising a tester through the WorkForce program. It was inspiring to see the effort that has gone into this venture and the way the trainings are done. Absolutely brilliant. Catherine was also a first time conference speaker, via the Speak Easy program.

Two other talks were happening at the other room during this point, with Oliver Erlewein and Hamish Tadeschi giving talks on “Reaching Beyond Performance in an Agile World” and “Testing your Driven Development” respectively. I missed these talks, I  hope TEAM will be having the slides or videos up at some point ????

During lunch, I got a chance to meet some of the Twitterati – it was great to have faces to Twitter handles. Met with Richard Robinson (we were classmates at BBST Foundations a good 4 years back!), Katrina Clokie, Erik Peterson, James Aspinall, Deepak Puri… that’s a long list ????

And then came the moment with Michael Bolton where we tried the Diffuse Bomb game. Whoa! I liked the game and the challenge. Although we managed to blow the bomb on the first two attempts, we successfully defused it the third time. High Fives! ???? The game is just for 3-5 minutes, but there is great learning involved in those minutes. Probably in another blog post! Thanks Michael for your time and patience!

We moved on to the next talk – “The School of Rock – CDT Uncut” where Brian Osman made all of us laugh with his rocking presentation. Lot of energy and passion on that one. The talk gave his journey from an artefact based tester to the CDT rock star, creating communities and cultivating a passion for better testing. You truly rock, Brian, such fun and you have got some moves ????

Katrina Clokie delivered her talk on “Testing Web Services and Micro Services” and the challenges she faced in them. Despite battling a sour throat, she gave a good account on her learnings and pathways on testing web services. The talk had a good response from the crowd with lots of questions being asked.

Two fantastic talks were happening at the other room during this time, with Aaron Hodder delivering “Software Cartography (or how to build multidimensional information radiators)” and James Kitney on “How to Build a Guild”. From the Twitter reaction, I could see that Aaron’s talk had a lot of inspiring stuff. Would love to attend that talk some time!

We had 6 lightning talks:

Obviously, Santosh Tuppad delivers his talks in the calmest high octane way ????  I love listening to this guy, it is hard to find a person who has such clarity on his thoughts. And his passion for learning is unparalleled in my opinion. His moto seems to be “Get bored, learn something new”  I’m proud of you Bro, you are doing awesome for the community ????

Then we had the closing Keynote by Anne-Marie Charret “A Test Management Retrospective”. Charret talked about Test Management. Test Leadership, and Coaching. A lot of it had been a retrospective of what she had done at Tyro and being obsessed with delivering the best testing service. And the most important part is “It is true that there is a lot of struggle in building a great product. But when we struggle, we Learn”. We need to keep learning and we need Test Leadership for that. I’m glad we have lot of people to look up to in the CDT community!

Thus ends a great day of learning. There is a whole lot of Twitter Activity with #ATD2K16 which you can follow. Lot more images from myself and from many other attendees.

Thanks to TEAM for this awesome conference, looking forward to the next one!

Tomorrow, the work shops! I’ll be in the “Ruby for Testers” by Scott Miles. Hoping to be a great day of learning, just as today!