Let’s Test 2012 - an awesome conference! (Part 3)

Posted May 28, 2012

By Huib Schoots

2 min read

Tuesday 8th May: Let’s Test day 2: Sessions

Keynote Rob Sabourin

After a “tired” but funny introduction by Paul “Hungover” Holland, Rob Sabourin climbed the stage to do a great keynote titled “Elevator Parable” in which he told a story about a conversation he overhead in the elevator. The central thing is his talk was a bug from this conversation. Rob entertained the audience with voice mail messages from famous testers like James Bach and Rex Black. After every message the audience was asked to triage the bug. A very entertaining and interesting talk. Duncan has written a much more comprehensive blog post about this talk and you can find it here.


Paul “hungover” Holland	Rob Sabourin (photo by Anders Dinsen)

Rob Sabourin – Elevator Parable

Sessions

After the keynote I went to four really good sessions:

Markus Gärtner – “Charter your tests”: in which we worked in small groups to create charters to test an application of our choice. A nice “dojo” style exercise with some good discussions in the retrospective part.
Rikard Edgren – “Curing Our Binary Disease”: a great presentation in which Rikard warns us for the Binary Disease. A serious disease with four symptoms: pass/fail addiction, coverage obsession, metrics tumor and sick test techniques.
Louise Perold – “Tales from the financial testing trenches”: for me, working for a bank, this case study was very interesting. She shared her experiences testing context-driven in the financial domain: some topics she covered were low-tech dashboard, reporting with mind maps, learning & motivation, effect mapping and debriefing.
Anne-Marie Charrett – “Coaching Testers”: in this session Anne-Marie did a short introduction presentation of the coaching model she and James Bach have developed. After that she did a short coaching session via skype on the beamer to show how it works. Next the group was invited to coach 5 anonymous testers via skype on the laptops in the back of the room. The exercise was fun and it was interesting to see how a coaching session via skype evolves. David was one of the testers coached, read his write-up.


Markus Gärtner - Charter your tests	Working in groups in Markus’ session

Sharing and discussing results	Some Results and flip chart art

Lunch Outside (who is the person in the middle?)	Rikard Edgren - Curing Our Binary Disease

Louise Perold - Tales from the financial testing trenches	Anne-Marie Charrett - Coaching Testers

Live coaching testers.

Evening fun

Again the evening brought lots of fun: Let’s Test had an amazing evening program including guided art and nature tours, sports, open space, lighting talks, competitions in the test lab, quizzes and … sponsored free beer! Great to have all attendees of the conference present at the same venue all night. This creates a wonderful ambiance with fun, good conversations and you meet a lot of interesting people.