Sunday, August 12, 2018

Cast 2018, day 2


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. 


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.  



Friday, August 10, 2018

CAST, day 1


And what a packed day it was.
It all started with lean coffee facilitated by Matt Heusser, which was both enjoyable and insightful (the picture above is the discussions we were having, taken by Lisa Crispin). My main takeaway from this session was the importance of being able to verbalize your skills to yourself, and to communicate them to others. Also, this was my first lean coffee where there was actual coffee.
Then, the opening keynote. Liz Keogh was speaking about Cynefin, and delivered a great talk. I did  hear a similar version of this in ETC2017, but it did not matter very much. In fact, listening twice enabled me to better understand and process what she was speaking about. In short - developing software is complex space, probe a lot and make sure that your probes are safe to fail. Also, use BDD and avoid tools such as Cucumber (BDD is about the conversation, not about the feature files).
After the keynote I went to a workshop on domain testing passed by Chris Kenst and Dwayne Green. It's always nice to refresh the fundementals, and to learn a new name for that (I was familiar with the concept of Equivalence classes and boundary value analysis, that are techniques inside the space of domain testing).
During lunch I managed to talk a bit with some people, and then went on to the lobby where I met Alex and we've talked about organizing your desktop in a way that should (we guess) increase productivity. What I really liked was that we actually started mocking the screen layout that we would want to see. It was very cool to watch Alex tear down some paper pieces so that it would be easy to move them around. This sort of think kind of makes me want to go out and figure how to implement such a thing. The main challenge is that in order for such a solution to work, it must be ingrained in the OS is a seamless way, so that it will always be on top, and manage the size of just about everything else. I wonder if Windows are already offering such a thing.
The first talk I attended had a promising title about coaching and the GROW framework. It took me a while to find out that I didn't connect with the content and move to another talk - "Don't take it personally" by Bailey Hanna. I got just in time for the exercise. Not really knowing what I should do, my instruction was "be aggressive", and I do owe Polina another apology. I was very difficult.
After that, I went to Lisi's talk about her test journey. So far, I've listened to two of Lisi's talks, and they have been very dangerous to my free time. Lisi has a way of sharing her experience while showing her passion for what she did, and has a unique way of inspiring others to do the same. It was my favorite session of the day. Also, before having a chance to regret this, I agreed with Alex on pairing together, and we decided that by the end of August we will set up a time for a session.
My talk was up next, and I took my usual 5 minutes to stress out. The talk itself went ok, I think - By the end of it I felt as if I was pushing a bit hard to hold the list of ideas as coherent a narrative as I could, but I wonder how many in the audience actually saw it. The open season was, as expected for the time and type of talk - awkward silence. My facilitator at the talk - the Friendly Richard Bradshaw managed an amazing feat of wriggling some questions out of the audience, and had some interesting questions himself.  After the talk I got some very kind feedback, which I greatly appreciate.

A surprise was set for the evening - after a short time to meet & mingle, we all (or, up to a 100 of us) got on a bus and took of to the Kennedy space center. Rockets, space, astronauts, nice company (and even some food) - what more can one ask?
We got back to the hotel and I joined a couple of quick rounds in a card game I don't know the name of but was nice to play. Tired, I returned to my room and started writing this post, which, as you can see, I did not manage to complete before the conference was over.
Still, a whole lot more was waiting for me in the second day, but that's for another post that I hope to get on seen - there's still a week of vacation ahead of me, and I intend to make the most out of it.


Wednesday, August 8, 2018

CAST - Tutorial days



CAST has officially begun!
(I'll be keeping those posts short, because otherwise I won't have time writing them)
Yesterday I attended Anne-Marie Charrett's workshop about coaching testers. It gave me a lot of material to think about - The main message I took from there is that coaching someone is very much like teaching, only you need to be constantly aware of the meta-processes in place and enable the coachee (not really a word, I know) to walk the path they chose and develop the skills they need.
We had some nice exercises (though, practice coaching through Slack wasn't really working for me, and I probably owe my pair an apology for being semi-purposefully stubborn).
Besides the workshop, there was some nice food, and even nicer people that are always interesting to converse with.
After walking to dinner(much less time than the day before, where we walked for 20 minutes, found out that the restaurant was closing early due to an emergency and then walked 15 minutes further to another place), we played some board games that I have never heard about before, and there was much rejoice.
While some people decided to stay awake to watch the rocket launch (we are not far from Cape Canaveral), I was too tired and went to sleep (seriously - why launch stuff at 2am ? Can't those people just move the galaxy a bit so that it will be in a more convenient time?). 

Today was my day off - I did not attend any workshops, but instead took some time to go over my slides (still not done with that) and took a surfing lesson with Marianne. It was just immensely fun - all of that falling to the water and just barely being able to stay on the surfboard - I wasn't expecting to enjoy this as much, and yet I did.
Later today, I'll be going on a night paddling (it promises something with bio-luminescence, so it should be cool), and I expect to be completely wiped out after today, which appears to be my water-sports day.
So far - great time, great people.


Monday, August 6, 2018

PreCAST


So far, the conference experience is starting great as expected.
Yes, I know, the conference officially doesn't start until tomorrow's workshops, but as always, the conference is up once the people start to gather.
In hope of having some time to fend off jet-lag, I took an early flight, landing on Friday after a 12 hours flight to Newark, followed by 2.5 hours flight to Orlando (which I nearly missed after not checking that my gate wasn't moved - it was), then all I had to do is to try and stay awake (my Fitbit did not detect any sleep during Thursday, which was the night of the flight. I believe I did manage to squeeze in a couple of sleep hours) and hopefully, that would take care of the jet-lag. It seemed to work, I woke up at 7 AM after ~8 hours of sleep and set to explore the location. Well, it's humid, and hot. so walking about is not very pleasant, and Cocoa beach is a rather dull place, if you are not into surfing or simply staying at the beach.  I spent most of my day out, then rented a surfboard just to see what I can make out of it (never before have I ever held one of those, let alone try to use it). I had a nice time, but the sea claimed my hat.
I got to, briefly, meet Liz Keogh and Darren Hobbs before being picked up by Curtis Petit and his family for dinner.

Yesterday, I woke up at 4:30 AM (Jet lag? or simply because I slept my 6 hours? I don't know) and went to see the sunrise at ~6:00, where I encountered Anne-Marie Charrett. I then set out to find a new hat and from there to see the Kennedy Space center at Cape Canaveral. A tip for future visitors - Cape Canaveral is *Not* where the space center is, it's over 12 Miles to the north of that. I'll have to check the Kennedy space center another time. 
At the evening I got to meet some wonderful people - some for the first time. I met Curtis again, with Matt Heusser, Maria Kademo, Ben Simo Liz and Darren and we headed out for dinner.

So far, so good, looking forward for today.