Beware The Pickle - Beren Van Daele & Ard Kramer

Talk Description

Beware the Pickle (An experience report by Ard Kramer & Beren Van Daele)

Cucumbers get more pickled than brine gets cucumbered. - Prescott’s Pickle Principle

What happens when you travel across Europe in search of ‘The Ultimate Test Story? Well… We’ve done just that! 10 workshops across Poland, Romania, France, the UK, The Netherlands, Ireland, Portugal,... Can you imagine the kinds of experiences, learnings and tales we’ve encountered? We can’t either, yet we were there to hear it for ourselves.

To be fair, we’ve only just recuperated from a period of figuring out what exactly we were part of: A whole year of being baffled by testers that trump each other with unbelievable story after unbelievable story. What exactly can you learn from the guy that sent a few hundred packets of household items to his neighbours,... by mistake? What exactly is there to think about the woman who opened the prisoners’ doors of section D by accident…. every night at 10 pm? With this talk, you’ll find out.

Firstly, we’ve learned that TestSphere is an excellent tool to get people mingling and talking about testing and secondly that testers are a curious and diverse bunch, who are exceptionally hard to define. Yet that’s exactly their strength!

We’ve listened to your stories, recorded the best ones and tried to find patterns in what makes a tester; a tester. The lessons we drew from all this, we’d love to share with you: Grand stories, peculiar experiences and the great secret of what binds us testers together.

Every one of our talks will be different as we offer several videos of the top storytellers of our workshop, yet we only show a subset of these during any one talk. Which ones will be up to you. Our storytellers, from across Europe, will guide us to explain:

• The impact a tester has on her environment;
• How the environment impacts the (im)possibilities of a tester;
• The value of being a tester;
• How testers differ from each other;

We offer the attendees insight into the uniqueness of testers, how their biggest power stems from being different, thinking different and acting different. In a world where conformity, repetition and colouring between the lines is worshipped, testers provide the much needed alternative point of view. Dare to be different. Aim to be different and beware the subtle tools of assimilation. Beware The Pickle.

Take-aways:

• Help you to identify what is unique to you and how to use that as your strength
• Hear diverse top stories by real practitioners
• Gain insight in the diversity that the test community embodies

By the end of this session, you'll be able to:

Ard Kramer

I am a software tester from the Netherlands and I am working for Alten Nederland since 2008. I call myself a Qualisopher which stands for someone “who loves truth and wisdom and at the same time is decisive to improve man and his environment” . This means I am interested in the world around us, to see what I can learn and I can apply in software testing. That is one of the reason why I tell stories in books and at (test) conferences such as EuroSTAR, Expo:QA, Belgium Testing Days, CAST and Testnet conferences. My dream is to participate, as a good qualisopher, in all kind of projects such as sports, culture or software testing. Projects which add value to our community: I want to inspire other people by cooperation, fun and empathy and hopefully bring light in someone's life.

Beren Van Daele

RiskStorming Creator

I am a consultant who shapes software delivery teams to improve on their work and their understanding of quality. Bringing RiskStorming to the world of Software Development.