One thing is common to all good conference – I miss out on sleep hours because there’s so much to do, and this conference was no different.
I woke up, organized my stuff, and went down to lean coffee, only slightly late. The topics, as usual, were very varied – We’ve discussed personal insecurities, what does it mean to be a senior team member (short answer – you don’t get to actually work) and how to approach the whole issue of effective and efficient documentation & reporting. Everyone was engaged - Almost every topic got at least one extra timeslot.
The opening keynote of the day was delayed due to the speaker flight being delayed, so instead we got the next activity of the day a bit earlier. I got to Lisi’s mobservations session – she dealt really nicely with the surprising change of plans and had the classroom ready for a mob. If you are ever in a session where there is a demonstration of mobbing, do yourself a favor and volunteer to be part of the mob. Yes, you’ll be putting yourself in front of an audience, but watching a mob is nothing like participating in one. As a mob, we’ve spent quite a while in orienting ourselves around the application under test and trying to decide on a concrete direction that we should take, and had a difficult time doing that. But frankly – testing the application wasn’t really what we were there for. Learning to mob was our purpose, and Lisi provided some excellent guidance to help us focus on how we behaved as a mob and then how we behaved as individuals in a mob. All in all, we got a reminder of why mobbing is difficult, but also saw how effective it was in dispersing knowledge in the team – even if it was only how to use certain tools or deal with an operating system in German. I feel that this exercise should have been maybe a couple of hours longer to really get some decent pace, as a lot of the insights we came to did require both trying it out, and some hands-off reflection. But, given the constraints, and while there is always something more that can be improved, it was a good experience for me and I would be happy to have some more like it.
Sadly, I cannot say the same thing about the keynote, to which I didn’t connect at all. The overarching topic was similarities between UX design and testing, but it felt very remote and detached. Perhaps I was missing the background to appreciate such a talk. But, you know, that happens, too.
Good thing lunch was immediately after that. I had a nice chat over food and drink, and then went risk-storming with Lisa, Alex and a few other testers. This was a very interesting experience for me, and the first time I held a deck of TestSphere cards, which appear to be an interesting tool to have in certain situations.
Afterwards I attended Paul Holland’s workshop on unlocking creativity in test planning. It was very nicely built, and I got to both troll Paul over twitter by paraphrasing what he said and to take away some important insights from the workshop. First of all, a requirement for creativity is peace of mind, which is obtained by setting boundaries – both spatial and temporal. Second thing is that some ideas just take time and offline processing. Third, Ideas bring out other ideas, so stupid ideas would most likely attract some good ideas as well. But most importantly – Don’t burden yourself with too much information. Get a basic understanding of the task, then stop to think and process, and only after you done some hard thinking come back to the rest of details and see whether concerns you had are addressed by all of the tiny details you skipped, and what does it add to the mental picture you already have in mind.
The best talk of the day was waiting for last. I went to Marianne’s talk titled “Wearing Hermione’s hat: Narratology for testers” Marianne combined three of her passions: Testing, Harry Potter and literary studies. It was a perfect combination for me, and I happen to share her affection to those subjects, even if to a lesser extent (My focus during my studies was more on poetry and less on prose, and I don’t know my Harry Potter as deeply). Marianne spoke about how people tend to follow the first paradigm they adopted and ignore further information that might prove otherwise, which connected in my mind with Liz’s keynote about people tendency to seek, and pretend to find, order and patterns where there is none to be found. Another important observation we can borrow from narratology is the need to look again – our first read of the book is usually great to get a basic understanding of what’s going on the surface, but after we’ve gained this basic understanding, a second reading will expose new information that wasn’t as clear before, and that we can only now notice. With software it is very much the same – we learn a lot by doing, and I have yet to see a project that by the end of it people didn’t have a better way to do what they just did. Marianne also mentioned that many companies engage in “root cause analysis”, but are actually only scratching the surface. They understand what went wrong in this specific instance, but don’t actually take the extra step required to find the systematic fails that contributed to those failures. If you do those post mortems and keep a record of them, it might prove interesting to do a meta-analysis on several of them to try and decipher patterns.
Another thing I found in Marianne’s talk was the value of specialized language. She spent a few minutes in providing the audience with a simplified explanation of the technical terms “text”, “fabula” and “story”1.Afterwards, she used that distinction to point at a series of events where the story is different from the fabula, and what effect It had, and why changing the perspective helped in creating such “deception” that can only be seen and understood in retrospect. The fact that she had distinct names for two phenomena was not only useful as a shorthand, but also helped keep the two related ideas separate in the minds of the listeners, and be added to their toolbelt the next time they read a story. So, if you ever wondered why so many people fuss over terms and meaning while it’s clear that everyone understands what you mean – that’s why. Words, and technical terms2 in particular, are ways to direct our thought process and raise our awareness to things. They also carry with them a plethora of meanings and associations. For instance, during the talk I was reminded of Wolfgang Iser’s gap-filling, which is part of the reader’s-response theory, and thus immediately made it crystal clear that there is an important place for the “reader” who does the interpretation of the text and to the way they react.
All in all – A great talk to end the conference with. The only thing I’m missing is one of Marianne’s fabulous sketch-notes.
End the conference did I say?
Well, almost. We still had to grab dinner. I went to the room to rest a bit (it was a packed day, so I needed a few minutes to unwind). I then joined a very nice group containing Lisi, Thomas, Lena, Marianne, Lisa, Santiago and Andrea who were sitting and just chatting. It was a very nice way to say goodbye. We’ve sat for about three hours and then it was time to go to sleep. After all, I had a plane to catch in a ridiculous hour. I did manage to say goodbye to a whole lot of other people that were playing some board games.
And now (or rather, a few days ago, as I was writing most of this in the airplane leaving Orlando), the conference is over. I had a great time, and I have way too many people to thank for it to list them all here. Next time I’ll make sure to have some time after the conference.
1 I usually match “fabula” with “Syuzhet” (which I’m more comfortable spelling “sujet”), but Marianne was conscious enough to spare the audience from more definitions to confuse them. In short, fabula is the chronological order of events as they “happened” in the imagined world of the text. The sujet is the order events are presented the reader. so “I fell after stepping on my shoelaces” and “I stepped on my shoelaces and fell” are the same fabula, but different sujet. And yes, I had to go back to my class notes to verify that.
A text is an instance of a literary creation, it is the book one reads. ↩
2 When I say “technical term” in this context I mean any word that has a specific meaning within a profession which is different than the common understanding, or not commonly used outside of a specific jargon. ↩
