Hi everyone,
Now that all the TestBashes for the year are out of the way, I have a clear run for November and December to work with you all to get the meetup back up and running and launching the new Essentials brand. So let’s run through everything that has been going on and is coming…
New meetup curriculum
Firstly a big thanks to all of you who have made time for calls to discuss the new syllabus structure for Essential. Over the past month, we’ve evaluated the current meetup curriculum, discussed how we want to improve the learning for students and what our goals are for the future of the meetup. This has resulted in a newly specced meetup curriculum. Ultimately, we’ve decided to move away from the topics driven sessions that focus on specific areas of testing and geared the sessions towards being more practical. This will result in sessions that students can engage with and then carry what is taught in their work right away.
The broad structure agreed is:
- MEET-0 - Become a Mentor
- MEET-1 - What is Testing?
- MEET-2 - Testing requirements and ideas
- MEET-3 - Test planning
- MEET-4 - Testing the product
- MEET-5 - Reporting your testing
- MEET-6 - Going live
- MEET-7 - Improving quality
- MEET-8 - Recruitment
To be clear this is the high-level structure, there is still work to do to work out specifically what will be taught within each of these sessions. This will result is some sessions being split out to cover different angles or approaches (for example MEET-4 will be run multiple times with focuses on ET, Automation, Note taking, etc.). The main thing is that we’ve agreed that the sessions should focus on the testing lifecycle and testing activities, which will allow us to thread different skills and knowledge into each session.
The fortnightly sessions to review and capture learning outcomes for each session will continue and I hope you can make them and help us mould the upcoming year of teaching!
Essentials@TestBash
You may or may not be aware but we’ve announced two new Essentials based events at TestBash Brighton and we need your help with the one day event Essentials@TestBash.
The goal of the day is to run an event similar to how we’ve run the Technical testing meetup session. We will have multiple stands all themed around a different aspect of testing which attendees will move around. So we’re looking for at least six hosts to come help us run each stand.
We will cover travel and accommodation for anyone involved and I’m hoping we can use this as an opportunity to get together after the event to chat about all things Essential and maybe grab dinner together. So if you’re interested, please let me know.
Bye-bye GitBook, Hello Google Drive
Finally, hands up! I admit it! GitBook was a bad call. With the changes we’re making to Essentials (more about that soon) and the fact that there is no space to collaborate, comment or easily store content around lesson plans. I’ve moved everything to a Google Drive folder with a new easy to search structure.
Over the next couple of weeks, I will be in touch with you all regarding arranging meetups, so I will use that as an opportunity to get you setup with the drive folder and explain the structure.
That’s all for now. So much more to share, but those are the important points. Please ping me questions and comments
- Mark