CAST 2018

The coaching that I do focuses on improving skill through questioning and practice to develop a deep understanding of testing and how to perform it.

A coach can learn how to help both testers and developers to:

• Sharpen reasoning and critical thinking
• Explain your testing and why you tested
• Understand and deal with ambiguity
• Deepen your understanding of the testing you perform

The coaching model that I use is being developed by myself and James Bach. It uses Socratic questioning to probe testing knowledge, challenging developers and testers alike to think deeper and through practice come to a greater understanding of what testing is as well as how to test in a better way. The intent is for both student and coach to leave coaching feeling enthusiastic about testing, with the motivation to continue self-learning.

The tutorial will examine the coaching model. We will look at the following:

• Socratic Questioning
• Coaching Task
• Managing a coaching session
• Evaluating Coaching

Attendees will have the opportunity to observe, analyse, practice and steer coaching sessions throughout the day. This workshop is suitable for testers, developers and leads who want to learn how to coach team members in either a remote or local environment.

Is your team puzzling over how to feel confident releasing to production frequently with continuous delivery? Delivering reliable and valuable software frequently, at a sustainable pace (to paraphrase Elisabeth Hendrickson), is a worthy goal. DevOps is a hot buzzword, but many teams struggle with how testing fits in, keeps up, and contributes to the DevOps culture.

In this hands-on workshop, participants will have a chance to practice techniques that can help teams feel confident releasing more frequently. You’ll learn how your team can use a test suite canvas to discuss what questions each step in your delivery pipeline needs to answer, to understand the value each step provides. You’ll work in groups to come up with new experiments to help shorten feedback cycles, make sure all essential types of testing are done continually, and fit testing into the continuous world. You’ll learn that there IS a “test” in “DevOps”.

Whether​ ​your​ ​tests​ ​take​ ​minutes​ ​or​ ​days,​ ​and​ ​whether​ ​your​ ​deploys​ ​happen​ ​hourly​ ​or​ ​quarterly, you’ll​ ​discover​ ​benefits.​ ​You’ll​ ​participate​ ​in​ ​a​ ​simulation​ ​to​ ​visualize​ ​your​ ​team’s​ ​current​ ​path​ ​to production​ ​and​ ​uncover​ ​risks​ ​to​ ​both​ ​your​ ​product​ ​and​ ​your​ ​deployment​ ​process.​ ​No​ ​laptops required,​ ​just​ ​bring​ ​your​ ​curiosity.

Learning outcomes:

• Continuous delivery concepts at a high level, and the differences between continuous integration and continuous delivery
• Common terminology and a generic question list to engage with pipelines as a practice within your team
• How to use the test suite canvas to design a pipeline that gives your team confidence to release frequently
• Experience in analyzing pipelines from different perspectives to create a layered diagram of feedback loops, risks mitigated, and questions answered
• Ways your team can design experiments to address the many challenges of testing in a continuous world

Are your test sessions bogged down by excessive documentation and boring processes? Or do you find exploratory testing too uncontrolled and prefer structured tests and formal test reports? Come to this session to experience how using a visual model can increase your momentum without losing control.

In contrast to ad hoc or “intuitive” testing, Exploratory Testing expects us as professionals to have a systematic approach to testing. Structure and processes tend to be regarded as impediments to momentum, and when time is limited we start cutting corners. Cutting corners risks leaving us with a feeling of not being in control and bugs start slipping through cracks. We say this need not be the case. You can learn how to plan, test, adapt and report with minimal time by using visual models. We would like to invite you to a hands-on Exploratory Testing session, using mind mapping techniques for planning, executing and reporting our results. We will cover:

• Reviewing requirements (provided as a fictional business scenario)
• Planning, prioritizing and re-prioritizing your work
• Hands-on testing the actual web application and drawing conclusions
• Adapting to the unexpected
• Summarizing your findings and recommendations for further work in a concise and useful manner

You will be working individually or in pairs, and are required to bring a laptop. It is highly suggested that you download and install xMind (Freeware) and our Exploratory Testing template before the workshop. No previous experience with mind mapping is required. Having some familiarity with Exploratory Testing is helpful, but not a necessity.

Takeaways
·         How mind mapping can boost creativity and drive during Exploratory Testing
·         Ideas and a template for planning small test sessions
·         A chance to find bugs!

Do you feel like your team is under the gun to test everything when a new feature is rolled out? Do you worry that your team mates don’t understand why you choose to test the items you do? Do you feel like you can’t communicate those risks to them in a way they understand? Are there moments in your life where you deeply question if you can successfully complete the testing requirements of a sprint? Do you just really like cats? If you answered yes to any of those items–this is the talk for you.

We will define and discuss risk as a tangible metric, striving to break it down into components that you can use to talk to developers, product owners, business people, and any other stakeholders. Having a common language of what risk is and what it’s made of allows us to decide what we should test and when we should test it–and then communicate that to our stakeholders. We will also talk about building a risk matrix and why we should even bother. Included will be a heavy dose of jokes, storytelling, anecdotes, and pictures of my cat Dante.
Top 5 Takeaways:

• Definition of risk as a tangible metric (impact/probability of failure)
  
• Types of impacts that failure can have on your project and team
  
• How to define these terms for your team and facilitate communication
  
• Building a useful risk matrix
  

Did you ever wonder how to improve your testing skills? Well, I did. I wanted to learn where I stood in terms of my testing knowledge and at the same time improve my exploration and automation skills. Maybe dive deeper into special areas like security or accessibility testing. I read and thought a lot, but what I felt I was missing was hands-on practice. So I decided to run an experiment.

My hypothesis: “I believe that pairing and mobbing with fellow testers from the community on hands-on exploratory testing and automation will result in continuously increasing skills and knowledge as well as serendipitous learning. I’ll know I have succeeded when I noted down at least one concrete new insight or applied one new technique per testing session and shared that with the community.”
In this talk, I will share the lessons learned on my journey as well as tips for doing pair testing sessions yourself. Let’s uncover if my hypothesis proved true, that a testing tour is indeed a feasible and valuable way to improve your testing knowledge and skills!

Key takeaways:

• Hear about lessons learned as a testing traveler
• Get tips on how to make the most out of pair testing sessions
• Learn why collocation is not a requirement but an excuse and how you can benefit from geographical dispersal
• Get inspired to run experiments for your own personal development!

Being introduced to context driven testing is like coming up for air after being held underwater. That burning feeling in your lungs as you strive towards the light. Inching closer and closer, and then finally breaking through the surface and taking a big gasp of air.

You’re now above the surface breathing in deep letting go of the frustrations of “quality assurance”. You’re excited and tell others but they doubt the concepts and aren’t interested in CDT.  You realize that getting others to breathe deeply with you is not easy.

This talk focuses on the lessons learned from the successes and failures of trying to change Quality Assurance into Context Driven Testing.  Providing insights on organizational change concepts and the complexity of teaching others a different way of testing while enlightening your organization on software testing.

Takeaways:
•    The importance of the executive sponsor and how they can support you.
•    The power of enlisting others to become advocates for your change.
•    The power of creating a sponsorship model to help you navigate through an organization and draw support from outside your team.
•    Understanding when opportunities present themselves and how to capitalize on them.
•    Using concepts like social styles to maximize your communication with others.
•    Direction on how to get started and the small things you can begin doing now.

“Amazing things happen when we are open to accepting help from others, and willing to help each other.” Woody Zuill, the initiator of mob programming, nails it here. Never heard of mob programming so far? It’s basically this: “All the brilliant people, working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer.“ Though this might sound strange to some, it’s a wonderful approach to create learning situations and get the best out of everybody.

While more and more teams try out mob programming, observation is a skill that can be easily overlooked. However, it can help you with many things: developing your product to be truly valuable, testing your application, improving how your team collaborates, or even your own behavior. Are you aware of what’s going on? Let’s discover together in this interactive workshop on how a mob can help to gather observations and make better decisions based on them.

Key takeaways:

• Learn the basics of mob programming and practice them hands-on
• Sharpen your senses and level up your observation skills
• Reflect on what actually happened to make informed decisions on how to improve things

Have you ever seen a bug that was found by a customer and thought: “Really?”,  “Why would they have done THAT?” or “Why didn’t I think of that?”

It’s possible that you missed testing for that scenario not because of a lack of time or resources but instead because you lacked the creativity to imagine the substantially different ways your customers might try – or will try - to use your product(s).

In this workshop, Paul will show ways to improve your creativity and imagination. Based on years of experience and multiple various workshops and exercises Paul has created some approaches and ideas on how to identify new and creative test ideas. There will be hands on exercises to demonstrate the effectiveness of avoiding reading the detailed specifications (at least initially), of brainstorming, and of using past “test escapes” to prevent future issues.

Takeaways:

• Do not start a testing task by reading the detailed specifications or stories
• Use Brainstorming to build on your own ideas and learn from others
• Use your own and others’ customer found bugs to help plug holes in your coverage
• Use Idea Generating cards to help you think in different ways
• Give yourself boundaries of space and time to be creative
• Give yourself permission to be curious

Come present a long-standing suspicion, a burning question, or reaction to something you've heard at CAST.

Signups will be available during CAST.