We're finally able to bring TestBashX to you! TestBashX is our new TestBash software testing conference experience and will debut in Brighton on the 31st of March, at the British Airways i360 by the sea.
As always, Ministry of Testing is closely collaborating with local testers and this time all-around awesome community member Emma Keaveny is working with us to bring this innovative event to you.
Tickets are limited to 100 attendees, so make sure you get yours as soon as possible so you don't miss out on this great come back!
What's With the X?
The X stands for experience, which we know starts with an “E” but “X” sounded way cooler! The day will start and close with a talk and in between we'll have a learning circus.
A Learning Circus is an active, cooperative learning approach that involves groups of people moving around a space, visiting several learning stations and completing authentic collaborative tasks. Put simply, it’s loads of mini-workshops that you will complete with fellow testers.
The TestBashX Learning Circus will be made up of several learning stations with carefully crafted testing challenges and activities for you to complete in small groups. Each station will be run by a software testing expert and will focus on different testing topics. As an attendee, you'll then visit each station to ensure you get the most out of the day.
What Happened
Select a session to learn more about it.
The Most Valuable Talk Ever?
What
TalkDescription
KPI's/OKR's, Speed, Quality, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Communication - the buzzword list goes on, but is there actually any point in many of these buzzwords? And what “buzzword” do I feel is the most important?
VALUE!
How often do testers and quality professionals look at the "Value" of their work before, during, and (importantly!) after they do it? Value to their business, to their department, their team, their career and to themselves?
This talk will run through my thoughts about "Value" as both a hiring manager and as a quality professional.
What do I look for in the candidates I interview, and how can they "sell" their impacts to a potential employer to show what they bring to a business?
How can someone start right now to track their impacts and the value they generate each day, building-up a wealth of real-world examples that they can use to talk confidently in their yearly career growth conversations, in interview settings, and even at conferences with peers.
What strategies did I use as an employee to understand the context and scope of my work and team, and start to understand firstly whether I could generate value in that role, and then how I could use that to drive my career growth?
I'll be sharing experiences and anecdotes from a 19 year career in testing, quality and leadership, painting high-level pictures of responsibilities for folks to map to their own experiences, and talking about the (often hidden!) opportunities to generate Value for themselves, their teams and often the business itself.
Stories like:
- How did thinking about Value help me become a "test team trainer" a year into my testing career?
- How did I manage to be pulled to a product team I wanted to be on (away from a product team I didn't want to be on), using Value?
- How did I persuade my employer to fund a 4 day Rapid Software Testing course? Another story of Value.
- And many more similar Valuable (hah!) stories for folks to think about how they too can tap into Value.
Takeaways
- Real-world examples of different roles and responsibilities and how there's almost always an opportunity to find Value in them.
- Proven methods to track impact and value in daily work (I've helped 3 people to get promoted using these).
- How talking about Value and Impact, with examples can absolutely catapult your career.
- How evaluating Value on a regular basis can truly give your life meaning.
Speaker
Across his 19 years in the field of engineering, quality and testing he's been a web developer, tester, senior, team lead, test manager, head of testing, and has helped businesses to build quality-centric engineering practices and a focus around delivering customer value. He's now leading mobile application engineering at Ada Health, to improve their mobile apps, and to mature their consumer domain's engineering and delivery practices.
We've also seen his award-winning talks at several international testing conferences, including TestBash Brighton, where he spoke about Mental Health in Testing.
Quality Jenga
What
ActivityDescription
How does culture, process and collaboration impact how we deliver software? How can we work together to better improve the quality of our products and the quality of our testing?
In this activity, learners are given different roles and a task to create a Jenga tower. As we work to create a Jenga tower that doesn't fall over, we'll learn how collaboration is the key to success.
Takeaways
- Argue why collaboration is key to improving the quality of our products
Speakers
Riskstorming
What
ActivityDescription
How do you know which quality aspects matter most for your product? Can you identify which risks endanger those quality aspects? How do we test to make sure those risks don’t happen?
In this activity, you’ll learn how to answer all three of these questions. Using RiskStorming, you'll learn to identify what quality and risk mean to you and your team.
Takeaways
- Determine the priority risks for an application and how to test them
Speaker
I lead a company: Isle of IT
Together with like-minded people who value communication and transparency above all else, we wish to grow a company that enables people to be themselves. Experts to the outside, a fellowship on the inside.
Each member has the freedom to pursue their own merit, whatever that looks like, while also bearing a responsibility to the continuation and growth of the company. With full transparency, we aim to facilitate communication between members to find a balance that makes sense for themselves.
I am a Consultant:
I am a consultant who shapes software delivery teams to improve on their work and their understanding of quality. Once a Software Tester, sometimes a Product Owner, I travel around, meeting software crafters all across Europe to learn from and teach.
I create things:
- TestSphere, a testing card game that inspires and supports knowledge sharing
- RiskStorming, a workshop that focusses the team on quality and risks
- RiskStormingOnline.com is RiskStorming for the remote world.
I do conferences:
- BREWT is peer workshop for testers. (organiser)
- ITMatters is a conference for Diversity and Inclusion in IT (support)
API Testing and Automation
What
ActivityDescription
In this session you will try out a variety of tests in Postman, demonstrating how you can build robust test suites for your APIs.
You'll author some test scripts, automate tests, and dynamically control workflows using the collection runner and scheduled monitors - and if you’re still hungry for more you’ll experiment with the CLI collection runner Newman!
What you'll learn in more depth:
- Author scripts to test API request responses.
- Run collections via the collection runner in Postman and/or on the command line using Newman.
- Control the flow of request execution via scripting.
- Use scripts and variables to pass data between requests.
- Use dynamic variables and/or mock servers to automate request data generation.
- Set up monitors to observe API behaviour.
Takeaways
- Ability to leverage Postman API test and automation workflows in their development and deployment pipeline.
Speakers
Model and Test The Button
What
ActivityTopics
Description
What would you do if you were presented with a system that has no clear inputs and outputs? How would you learn how the system works and how would you test it? One great place to start is by building a model of how the system works.
For this activity, you’ll explore a device using a range of different questions and tools. What you learn will be used to create a visual representation of how the application works. So that you can pick the right testing approaches to learn more.
Takeaways
- Construct a model of an application to help guide testing
Speaker
The Heuristic Challenge
What
ActivityTopics
Description
Where do you get your crazy ideas from? As testers we have a mental toolbox of test ideas, but how do we keep it fresh and expand it?
In this activity, learners will come up with as many different test ideas as possible in a short frame of time. We’ll then learn how we can expand our ideas with heuristics to help us identify new ideas to expand our testing.
Takeaways
- Discover new heuristics to expand your testing abilities
Speakers
Test Team Roulette - Choose your Ideal Candidate!
What
ActivityDescription
If you could have any person join your team to help you succeed who would they be? What would they be like? and what skills would they have?
In this activity, learners are asked to work together to put together a testing role that would describe their ideal candidate to hire. By working together and empathising with different perspectives we'll learn how to find the right person for the job.
Takeaways
- Collaborate with others to find the right candidates to join your team
How Gaming Made Me a Better Tester
What
TalkDescription
Gaming is still seen as a bit of a childish hobby and something that’s a fun hobby but ultimately a waste of time. Stereotypes around gamers still paint them as an unhealthy subculture with portrayals showing socially inept, selfish trolls who can’t work with others.
What if I told you that gaming (specifically Dungeons and Dragons) actually helped me to become a better tester and agile team member?
I’ll set the scene by giving a brief introduction to roleplaying games (specifically Dungeons and Dragons) and my history with the game (including my time working with the charity Survivors UK to use roleplaying games as a therapeutic tool).
Talk through the skills that I’ve developed and honed through playing dungeons and dragons as a hobby and how they can be used to become an awesome tester.
- Working as a team; practising how to work together to solve a common goal where people are bringing different skills to the table. Knowing when to push the spotlight onto somebody else because they’re best fit to do something rather than hogging the limelight and being a rockstar.
- Building on ideas; roleplaying is improv which means building on ideas to keep up the creative flow using yes… and techniques. Learning how to actively listen to others and contribute something meaningful rather than just ploughing on with your own thoughts is useful (especially in triforce / story shaping / 3 amigos).
- Try things to solve problems; practising doing experiments in a safe environment to learn that it’s okay to try things. Analysing problems to think outside of the box to creatively solve them. Adapting and changing when your first solution doesn’t work.
- Being charismatic (Only nerds would think of charisma as a magical power); being like a bard and using the awesome power of charisma testing to find the good in something and charm developers.
- Being playful (Quality is serious, testing might not have to be); we can harness the playfulness inherent in gaming to our teams. Whether that be coming up with fun test ideas, finding the joy in gamifying our testing, team building or using otter based mascots to help us lang messages.
- Telling stories; roleplaying is all about the ability to spin an engaging narrative. This carries over to testing where we want to talk to our teams about testing, sell ideas into projects, conduct outreach and debrief testing, where we need to be engaging and compelling with our words.
- Empathy! Trying out being someone else in roleplay gives you practice at putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, you know what else needs that? Testing! We can use the empathy we develop from roleplay to think more about our users and what needs they might have.
Takeaways
- That roleplaying is awesome fun, makes for a great hobby and (hopefully) is something you’d like to try.
- That the skills from our hobbies and extracurricular activities make us more well rounded people and testers, so we should take the time to embrace them.
- Some practical skills from roleplaying games that you can try out to make your testing better.
Our Famous 99-Second Talks
What
99 Second TalksDescription
It's not a TestBash without 99-Second Talks!
The 99-Second Talks is the attendee's stage, a opportunity for you to come on stage and talk for, that's right, 99 seconds.
You can talk about anything, a testing topic you want to share, a personal experience, an idea sparked by all the amazing talks you've just listened... the stage is yours, for 99-Seconds!
The host will introduce you on stage and start the clock. As soon as the time's up, a noise will be heard and that's it: time's up!
Post-TestBash Evening Meetup
What
MeetupTopics
Description
What better way to finish the day, than with a post-TestBash Meetup?
We will be going up the British Airways i360 pod and enjoying the amazing Brighton views from up in the sky whilst sipping some drinks and munching on some canapes.
This evening is sponsored by our amazing sponsors IQVIA and Postman!
Frequently Asked Questions
Want to Sponsor TestBashX?
Want to sponsor our first TestBashX of the year? Download the brochure and contact us now via email to testbash@ministryoftesting.com. Be quick, as spaces are limited!
So What Should I Expect?
Two awesome talks from two accomplished speakers in the testing community.
After the opening talk, you will be grouped up with fellow testers and you’ll stay in this group for the duration of the day while you complete circus activities. This grouping is essential to the learning circus approach and we are confident you will learn just as much from your fellow testers as you will from the testing experts running the stations.
At the end of the day, you’ll walk away brimming with new knowledge and skills that you can implement at your workplace. Have we mentioned yet there will be some prizes too? 🤫
Do I need to bring a laptop?
No. All equipment for the activities will be provided by the station.
What if I don’t want to go into a random team?
Part of the goal of TestBash X is to meet new people and make new connections to help you with your learning long after the event has passed. It is also beneficial to learn from those that have an entirely different experience from you. TestBashX was designed around this. However, if you do not please let us know in advance if you want to pair with a friend or colleague.
I need to book accommodation, where should I stay?
We have secured a few hotels in the area, from where you can get a cheaper rate. You can check the available rates in this Hotel Rate Sheet - Password: MoT@Brighton2022
Travel and accommodation is at the attendee's own responsability.
I still have credit with MoT, how can I use it?
Get in touch with us via email at events@ministryoftesting.com with your previous booking details and we will send you a booking link.