Hello all!
To get the conversations and work started, we want to start a thread to capture ideas and problems everyone feels we should work on to improve Software Testing Clinic.
At the moment this is a free for all and we are looking for as much feedback as possible from everyone. The goal is to will collate all the feedback and stick it into a backlog for prioritising. So the more feedback the better
Thanks,
Mark
Awesome!
Thanks for setting this up, Mark!
First suggestion for something we need to improve: collecting feedback from attendees.
We used to ask attendees what they wanted to learn (“stick topics or questions on the wall” kind of thing). And also, for season 1 in London, we ran a retrospective after it to collect some feedback. Both of these things fell away, but feedback is important in helping us steer the ship.
Anybody got any ideas? Or does anyone collect feedback from their sessions in their cities?
A thing I struggled with today was the sponsorship. We pay in advance and put in an invoice through MOT.
How does everyone else organise it?
It can be a large amount of money to front. Mostly struggled due to having just bought a house and it’s after Christmas pay day. Normally not that much of an issue but do companies do that for others?
For London, they give us the venue and food/drinks for free, but in return, we do shout outs and put their logo on our site… So really we’re paying through marketing their brand.
I’d suggest if you need to pay them money, don’t do any promotion or shout out of their brand (since technically they didn’t sponsor anything if you are paying for the space - unless I’ve picked you up wrong?).
Use the marketing that we could do as bargaining power to reduce the costs.
The issue is that we have some sponsorship money that’s as paid to MOT. I then buy things and have to invoice MoT for the money. But fronting it was hard this month but then I didn’t realise that we got paid today. So it’s all ok.
I think for series two a venue which will organise the food and drink will help.
So we’ve not really done a great job of capturing the sponsorship activities for SWTC. I have made a task for myself to discuss this with the MoT team. Last thing I want to see is our hosts going out of pocket. Things may prove to be a bit easier now that I am a MoT employee in terms of expensing.