Glasgow Meetup Notes, 24th September

🗓️ Events (To be archived) Meetups
1

All,

Some photos

Thanks for coming along on Monday. It was great to see everyone. The venue wasn’t the best, so apologies for that, but I think the Lean Coffee format didn’t suffer from being held in a pub! This would be a good point to remind you we’re always looking for venues to hold future meetups, so if your office has some space we could use, please let me know.

We had some great discussions on various topics, and a couple begged the production of some outputs, which are detailed below;

Getting the best out of Retrospectives"

  • Use techniques to take the focus off "who" to "what" the problems were.
    • e.g. External facilitator from outside the team, use of a theme such as a sailing boat picture, and everyone puts notes of positives on the sails and negatives on the anchor.
  • Strengthen follow-up by strengthening all team members responsibility for retrospective.

Learning get-togethers: self-organising social learning events

  • Get list of possible future sessions for the meetup, or for internal events / ideas in your company / team

  • Meetup Sessions

    • Exploring Career Paths (fell into testing vs learning for the job)
    • Reverse Mentoring; "why?"
    • Introducing other communities to testing
    • Testing Circus
    • Specific / subject mentoring
    • Google Doc list of topics
    • Paired Testing - Choose from a list…
    • "I want to learn about…" (maybe like Codebar)
    • Look for mentors

  • Organisational interactions

    • Contacts with; Devs, Product Owners, etc
    • Reach out into education / younger potential testers
    • Paired Testing - Choose from a list…
    • Brown Bag Sessions
    • Practical Implementation > Transferrable Skills
    • Look for mentors
    • Peer Learning (Facilitators)

  • Write new app / site… "Tinder for Learning"

Self-Organising Team Work - How to do it well

  • No team leader?
  • Joint responsibility
  • Dev & Test (& BA?)
  • Managers in team (not managing)
  • Need somebody to signoff at the end
  • Identified management roles vs "Floating" roles
  • Implementation of methodology > experience?
  • Self-organisation vs self-effectiveness
  • Strong personality within groups
  • Measures of Success / Goals
  • Self-organising in Agile only
  • Retrospectives: what did / didn’t go well?
  • Relationship between Group and Product Owner
  • Small groups: Devs & a tester
  • Mutual respect for team and product
  • Estimates / time-tracking in groups
  • Teambuilding exercises
  • Defined roles within a team - Trust

Other topics

We also had a huge assortment of other topics that you suggested. I’ve taken a stab at grouping them below. These groups could form the basis of future meetups. If anyone knows of any expert people in any of these areas who could come and talk one month, let me know.

  • Training / Development
    • Best courses & certifications for moving into software testing (from developer)
    • Training > Books / sources
  • Methodology
    • test heuristics, DevOps, improving agile, TDD
    • why testing? Cost of quality, demonstrating value
    • Recognising when something is "Good enough"
    • Test heuristics
    • Demonstration of work
  • Communication
    • Communicating the value of testing and the needs of testing to the rest of the organisation
    • Communication - difficult conversations, different levels of understanding
    • Knowledge Transfer
  • Test Approaches
    • "Buy-ins" to exploratory vs manual testing
    • Exploratory Testing
    • A11y testing
    • REST API Testing using Groovy
    • Auto pre-testing using Groovy
    • DAST
    • Peer Testing
  • Organisation
    • The trend to having SDETs
    • How to get on with developers?
    • Working with business users
    • How to get better at moving from one topic to another? e.g. lots of different stories in a sprint?
    • Time management and estimation
    • How to improve efficiency in tackling the tickets in sprint?
    • How much input does a tester have in prioritising the tickets?
    • Test Plans out of date
    • Test environments
  • Regression
    • How to best implement regression testing (in this day and age)
    • How to plan regression testing
  • Automation: When? Benefits?
    • When to automate tests?
  • Misc
    • Business Intelligence Testing
    • Re-cover some of last year’s sessions, e.g. new testing tools for different test stages
1 Like
2

Are we able to set up a vote or poll on here at all (we could use an external poll site, right enough) - perhaps polling on the chat subjects first as they were most popular on the night?

3

I’ve asked on Slack, so we’ll see what they say?