After a two year break, I could finally attend the Agile Testing Days in person. I was a bit worried about having to deal with the corona virus floating around and infection counts increasing significantly in Germany. However, the organisers handled this exceptionally well: Only vaccinated or recovered people were allowed to attend, every attendee received two test sets for self-testing and the certificates to prove vaccination/recovery were checked twice: During check-in at the hotel and the conference. During the conference it became obvious that many (likely most?) people tested every day. For me this meant I felt a lot better!
Additionally, they offered ‘colour coded’ masks: A blue masks indicated “I’m OK with getting near people, even hugging” and black ones which meant “I prefer some distance, please”. I took a black one and was pleased that people respected this. Thank you everyone!
What follows is a summary of some sessions and events.
Monday
Originally I had planned to give my workshop “Get a Lot Out of This Conference” (a teaser video is available on Vimeo), however it turned out that most first time attendees weren’t at the conference on Monday already, some would even only arrive on Wednesday. Since this workshop makes most sense when done before the conference, we decided to cancel it. And that’s OK since my ‘plan B’ was to attend the session to build a Tiny House. – Sadly this session also had to be cancelled, for reasons outside the control of any one at the conference. Thankfully the organisers allowed us non-builders to join on of the other sessions of this day and I could participate in “A Path to Holistic Testing” presented by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory. Alex Schladebeck also joined my table. It was super interesting to see how being a CEO can change focus, when it comes to sign-up forms for courses (this was the example we used in the exercises). Hint: The GDPA plays an important role.
I learned a lot in this super entertaining tutorial. This will be very useful in helping my team.
Tuesday
A session I looked forward to a lot was Maaike Brinkhof‘s “The Struggle with Learning How to Code”. I enjoyed the story telling about her experiences in learning to code immensely. She also offered great tips for how to prevent the barriers she ran into.
The second talk I attended was Alex Schladebeck who presented “Unit Testing and TDD from the tester perspective”. It was a great presentation and I am already looking forward to getting the slides which contain links to resources and further information.
The ‘traditional’ highlight of this day is the costume party including dinner and the award ceremony for the MIATPP (Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person) award. This year I had the honour to be asked to announce the winner. As every year, first the dinner is served and then the award. I had a hard time keeping a straight face when the (future) winner asked if they may join my table. Introducing the winner and keeping the tension up to the very last moment was great fun, especially since apparently no-one had any clue who might be the MIATPP this year.
Again congratulations, Raj Subrameyer, MIATPP Award Winner of 2021!
Continue reading the second part at https://seasidetesting.com/2021/11/22/agile-testing-days-2021-part-2/
One Reply to “Agile Testing Days 2021 – Part 1”