Notes from Øredev 2011 Rikard Edgren
I spent two days in Malmö attending a developer conference with a fantastic test track (put together by Sigge Birgisson.)
I did a presentation on Curing Our Binary Disease (slides, abstract), which was much better received than I hoped for (I thought it was a binary love/hate talk)
Good questions and talk about being inside the potato, how do you know where you are?
Pradeep and Rikard in front of Øredev projector
Pradeep Soundararajan talked convincingly about caring for the users, e.g. by using Twitter as a source for test ideas.
He also said the context-driven community has moved from Pass/Fail to “Is there a problem here?” (still a binary question though…)
Shmuel Gershon shared an experience report of a 100% exploratory testing project, with qualitative reporting and everything (“it’s called quality report, not quantity report”.)
Gojko Adzic talked about testers needing to adapt to how development is done now, and put most of their time ensuring others write good automated tests.
“There’s so much mistrust in the processes.”
Henrik Andersson wants, with right, a diversified testing team, and therefore only hires context-driven testers 😉
Just joking, he said people can read the same excellent books, as long as they think critically and learn other things.
Selena Delesie explained how to focus the testing effort on customer needs; “testers are information radiators”.
Zeger van Hese made the presentation that I enjoyed the most. A thoughtful walkthrough similarities between the fine arts and testing.
“The Hungry Eye – thoughtfully looking at software”
Janet Gregory highlighted five enlightened areas since Agile Testing was released: feature acceptance, collaborative automation, large organizations, distributed teams, continuous learning.
Outside the venue I had many interesting conversations, there were testing games, food and drinks, Black Viper and even imitations, and all in all a very nice experience.
Thumbs up for a testing session with Pradeep and Shmuel that showed (the need for) different note taking styles.
The presentations will be made available online at www.oredev.org/
Glad you liked my presentation, Rikard. And thank you for your artful feedback.
Zeger
I feel honored to have met you Rikard. You are a hero. I am so glad that other testing folks I met in Oredev helped me in many ways than just gaining more humility.
Is there a problem here? is not a binary question. It is not about “Yes” or “No”. It is more than that. I say, “Considering this specific oracle, there appears to be a problem but however if you were to chose other oracles it might not” or “It doesn’t appear to and that makes the case more interesting”
Even otherwise, binary isn’t bad always. We got to do more testing sessions as planned to get our understanding about this going.
You have successfully converted me to be a fan of your style, work and focus.