Thursday, December 20, 2018

2018 - A Crazy Year in Retrospect

What a year. It was crazily busy and yet incredibly awesome. Here's my end-of-year review of all the great things that happened in 2018. Time to celebrate and take a deep breath!

Timeline of 2018

If it's scary, do it more often, right? Like releases? As you can see below, this wisdom applied to both my public speaking as well as my pair testing challenges as well.
  • January
  • February
    • I joined our company's newly found Tech Chapter, a cross-team structure to drive technical topics on a global level.
    • European Testing Conference: Toyer Mamoojee and I told our story how we became learning partners. In addition, this was our very first paired talk!
  • March
    • I created the concept for the first tech conference of my company, the FlixTechSummit, and started putting the plan into practice together with a group of wonderful people across tech. 
  • April
    • Mob Programming Conference: I got invited to facilitate two mob sessions and visited the US for my very first time.
    • DevExperience: This developer conference added a new testing track and invited me as speaker.
    • My product team implemented and achieved a zero defect tolerance policy and has adhered to it ever since.
    • I introduced two other product teams at our company to the mob approach.
  • May
    • I wrote my first post for our company's new tech blog about my story as first-time conference speaker.
    • Toyer Mamoojee and my extended pact group kicked off.
    • I mentored people on public speaking for the first time.
  • June
  • July
    • I got promoted to "Principal", which is the next seniority level after senior in our company and comes with working on a global level in addition to the work in our product teams.
  • August
    • CAST: I shared the lessons learned on my testing tour and inspired others to go on their own tour. Also, I introduced further people to the mob approach.
  • September
    • SwanseaCon: I got selected again to speak at this wonderful software crafter conference, sharing my testing tour lessons here as well.
    • TestBash Germany: I started my sketchnoting experiment, inspired by Marianne Duijst. I did sketchnoting at four conferences now, and I can clearly see my progress as well as the benefits this method provides. I even managed to inspire others to start their own sketchnoting journey!
    • I learned once more about the power of visibility and positive feedback, this time within my own company.
    • Agile Greece Summit: Thanks to Maaret Pyhäjärvi I got invited to speak in Athens about my journey at my current company FlixBus as well as facilitate a mob session. The talk triggered lots of conversations, the mob session inspired people to try it in their own companies!
    • Toyer Mamoojee and my extended pact group evolved into a power learning group bringing together even more wonderful people to learn from.
    • Despite all the time I've spent away from my product team during the year already, my team still had my back and everything was working very well.
    • I had learned to acknowledge that I am technical during the past years, and to tell people so. This time I received a wonderful reminder not to belittle any skills I have.
  • October
    • A dear teammate triggered revising our automated end-to-end tests in an incremental way by frequently pairing with me.
    • HerCAREER: I facilitated a meetup at this career fair and exhibition targeted at women, sharing my story as well as answering any of their questions regarding my job as tester.
    • My testing tour ended - and it was a full success.
  • November
  • December
    • I received absolutely lovely peer feedback from my product team, even though I've been a lot at conferences or working on other company initiatives. Seems I managed to strike the balance in their point of view!
  • General
    • Overall, I now gave 15 sessions at 11 conferences in 7 different countries since September 2017.
    • I received further speaking offers and other opportunities and was strong enough to say no. Note to myself: Practice that more often.
    • Including this one, I wrote 45 blog posts this year, summing up of a total of 75 since I started this blog in December 2016.
    • I continued to attend several different local meetups, something I only started last year.
    • In my company's testing community, the other two moderators got engaged a lot more this year. We tried lots of different formats for our monthly meetups, aiming for continuously improving how we can provide value for each other.
    • I made some further steps towards changing the world to the better when it comes to diversity and inclusion. I spoke up in case of bad talk; not always, but a lot more often. I made colleagues aware of the singular they and asked them to get used to it. I made clear that as a woman I don't feel included in "guys", and I know many more who don't as well.
    • I received so much lovely feedback from the community. This means a lot for me and is super encouraging!
    • As you can clearly see above: I got a LOT better at recognizing and stating my own achievements. I indeed practiced to do so! I'll be glad I wrote about them so I can remind myself of them whenever impostor syndrome overcomes me again.

Thanks Are Due

There are so many people to thank. Simply look at above tweets and you see I was not and am not alone on my journey. I am so grateful to have so many people around me! Lists are always incomplete, however, I'd like to give it at least a try and close this year by explicitly thanking the following people as they gave me a boost this year, provided invaluable feedback, support, encouragement, advice, and more. THANK YOU.
  • My personal learning network, with my accountability and learning partner Toyer Mamoojee leading the way! Also, I'd like to thank everyone of our power learning group explicitly: Dianë Xhymshiti, João Proença, Mirjana Kolarov, Viktorija Manevska, Simon Berner, Lilit Sharkhatunyan, Pooja Shah, Dragan Spiridonov.
  • All those wonderful people who joined me on my testing tour this year, with Maaret Pyhäjärvi in first place who heavily influenced my tour through leading by example. Peter Kofler for having three pair testing sessions with me and agreeing to continue pairing regularly in 2019.
  • All people of the Women in Testing slack as this is a most wonderful support group and network I learned to heavily appreciated.
  • All those people who provided me new opportunities! Like getting selected or even invited to conferences, webinars, podcasts, writing articles, and more.
  • All those people with whom I went sightseeing after conferences - I had a lovely time with you! Lisa Crispin, Barney Dellar, Marcus Hammarberg, Nancy Van Schooenderwoert, Woody Zuill, Dawna Jones, Mark West, Marianne Duijst, Gwen Diagram.
  • Marianne Duijst, for being such a huge inspiration when it comes to getting out of our own comfort zone, public speaking, sketchnoting, and more.
  • Patrick Prill, whose kindness, encouragement, support and wonderful constructive feedback on my conference talks is invaluable.
  • Thomas Rinke, for all the things he does to drive our community forward, for being a great ally, for being a wonderful person to talk with in general.
  • Ashley Hunsberger, for openly sharing her thoughts and emotions and for providing sound advice on my very first keynote!
  • George Dinwiddie, for sharing his story when it comes to bad talk, and for having a sympathetic ear when it was most needed.
  • My fellow FlixTechSummit organizers, for their hands-on support and hard work. No one could have done it alone and we made this first tech conference happen together!
  • And last but not least: My wonderful product team! I know we have each other's backs and this is not taken for granted. THANK YOU.

Outlook for 2019

Here's a sneak peek of what's coming next.
  • #CodeConfident: I decided on my personal challenge for 2019. Several people already offered their support and am eager to kick it off.
  • I will continue pair testing on the topic of security with Peter Kofler.
  • In the first quarter I offer cross-team and cross-role mob sessions at my company to have people learn with and from each other. The first response was positive and people already signed up.
  • TestBash Brighton: I have the chance to finally experience the home of all TestBashes and share my lessons from my testing tour.
  • There are more conferences to come, so stay tuned.
  • There will be a second FlixTechSummit to organize! I hope we can include our lessons learned and make it even an better learning experience for everyone.

The Biggest Challenges

Other speakers are frequently asking me: You're all over the place, doing so many things - do you still work? When do you work? How to deal with work when you're speaking? The funny thing is that my colleagues keep asking me: Do you have any free time at all? (They know I do work indeed.)

Now, I do all of that and more. There's family, friends, and personal interests. Last year I wrote I noticed I played a lot less computer games! Unfortunately that's still true. Therefore, I explicitly included this as an indicator to pause in my new #CodeConfident challenge. So, besides that, my biggest challenge for 2019 will be to take care of myself.
  • Avoid "hamstering". The more I did and shared publicly, the more visible I got, the more opportunities opened up for me. Which is great! The downside: it's really hard to say no to things I'd love to do, however, I only have limited capacities just like anyone else.
  • Balance the load. Even when carefully selecting what I do, I know I will do a lot. So I need to balance my time even more carefully.
Portia Tung at Agile Greece Summit 2018 told us: "You may." Allow yourself to play. I add: and allow yourself to take a break and rest. I am looking back at wonderful 12 months and I am looking forward to what's coming in the new year. See you all in 2019!
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Wednesday, December 12, 2018

A New Pact: My Challenge for 2019

It's that time of the year again! It's time for a new pact to tackle my next big learning challenge.

Some Background

Toyer Mamoojee and I found each other as learning partners at Agile Testing Days 2016. We made a deal to help each other out of our comfort zones and tackle a challenge that really scared us: public speaking. The goal of our first pact was to return to Agile Testing Days 2017 as speakers - and we did it! This had worked so well and we had benefited from our mutual learning journey so much that we agreed to do a second pact for 2018. This time our goals diverged. I committed to pair with many different testers to learn where I stand and increase my testing skills. So I went on a testing tour this year - and it was a huge success again.

Meanwhile this whole learning partnership had created quite some buzz. We had openly shared our learning journey with the world and people got really interested. At first another group got inspired to create their own pact. Then Toyer and I had the opportunity to extend our own partnership to a pact group with a few more people. Out of that, a power learning group with even more awesome persons evolved; while all other formations were still valid and going on. More and more people got interested so that recently a second power learning group got started!

What scares me most nowadays?

That has always been my starting question. I mean, think about it: what scares you most when it comes to your personal development?

As the previous two pacts had went so well and provided so much personal value for me I knew early on I wanted to do a third pact for 2019. Therefore, I had gathered first thoughts already since mid of the year when it was already clear that the testing tour was a success. Here's the unedited, raw list of thoughts and ideas that I had always added to. I felt the urge to edit the points to make them more readable for you, and more presentable for me, however, I decided to share them just as they are, unadorned. I hope you can still follow my train of thoughts.
- Do something like http://www.100daysofcode.com/
- coding tour? myself? for non-advanced? automation tour?
- testing tour 2019 - focused on one topic, repeated with same people?
- practice technicality
- tools tour
- code on GitHub, share, have code reviewed, use lots of tools together with code
- share knowledge at company: workshops, coaching, mobs, training, etc., repeatedly
- focus on learning
- fix the basics
- security testing with Peter
- Developing mobile app with Guna
- Trish Koo: If anyone's interested in paid 1:1 career or test automation mentoring, DM me. I'm happy to work across timezones, online.
- talking testing, testing on stage
- do test retreats
- automation
- feel I'm lacking, coding skills
- coding tour? even scarier!! GitHub; upskill & practice tour; or: tooling tour! still pairing up for learning, common motive across years
- cross-team solutions
- embrace diversity of everything vs. stretched thin
- proving I'm technical
- start own automation and or app project or several, invite others to pair with you on them, can also work solo on them, post learner's journal notes on blog after pairing of noteworthy, short but insightful, public on GitHub, scary so it more often, show vulnerabilities to the best, but after one year I'll be awesome, chance to adapt after 3 months, more flexible, run it under own hashtag again, able to talk about it, combines learning approaches that have proven successful already, more focused, against not technical & for more fullstack
- add exit criteria! Not only hypothesis
- decide whether to continue security testing sessions with Peter, once per month and inform him
- https://twitter.com/codecopkofler/status/1057732730430148609
- https://twitter.com/profesor_dragan/status/1057893852835500032?s=19
- do a testing demo on stage, explore, use automation, even write code; show and tell
- pair with Maaret more
- speak your mind and give feedback in time
- test in front of audience, show and tell
- do teaching videos
- do many small experiments, where people can join our not, to combine with solo, e.g. run for one month, like MoT challenges, security, tools, automation, TDD etc. And close it with facilitating a mob about this topic to have others learn together, share insights as tweets, one blog post per month or optional; freedom to adapt any time, just be transparent about it
- integrate TAU course in challenge
- do courses from personal Trello like https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/beaucarnes/angular-tutorial-course--OHbjepWjQ or the security challenge
- include security testing with Peter?
- think about mission/vision: conquer my fear and inspire by doing so; internal: learning platform?
- AI, ML, neural networks?
- code collaboration challenge; anything coding, public, GitHub, call for collaboration #codingchallenge, metrics!
- continue speaking, continue with Peter on security testing, continue workshops at work and meetups, do video course
- measure hamster wheel, indicators as well: have you played any game? Exit criteria
Do you see any patterns here? I do.

Pact #3: A Brave New World

From all those ideas and thoughts that I jotted down during the past half year, I found the following to be my condensed next big fear and therefore my chosen challenge for 2019.
The challenge: Become code-confident. My programming skills can only be described as modest - at best (and I'm not being modest here). I always wanted to dive deeper and learn more. So far, however, I've rarely honed this skill. Some years ago I tried to practice on my own but lost momentum; the biggest part of my recent experience stems from pairing and mobbing together with my product team at work. Now, programming or coding (to keep it simple I'll use these terms interchangeably in the following) is a skill that many people benefit from, no matter their role; already now, and presumably even more in the future. Looking at my own power learning group, nearly everyone of them is actively programming in everyday work. To add to that: people talk a lot about how essential coding skills are for us testers. Whenever someone talks about programming skills as prerequisite, or as absolute standard, I feel I don't belong and that soon enough everyone will see that, too. Even worse, many people consider you only technical when you're able to code. I absolutely don't share this viewpoint, but yet feel the need to prove myself that I can code. So it's about time to conquer this fear of losing my face by showing how much I don't know yet, to see for myself how much I can increase my programming skills in a certain time frame, and most importantly to become confident that I am not only able to read code but also to write code myself. In short: I want to become code-confident.
How to solve this challenge while staying in the learning zone without crossing over to the panic zone? I made a great experience formulating an underlying hypothesis for my last pact, so I decided to do it again.
The hypothesis: I believe that doing many small hands-on coding exercises and challenges, on my own as well as together with other interested people, will result in increased confidence in my programming skills. I’ll know I have succeeded when I  have developed a small product from scratch.
When coming up with a concrete experiment, or let's rather call it a probe, to test this hypothesis, I learned from my past pacts. I wanted to make this public so that I will consider it as binding and give back to the community at the same time, hopefully inspiring others to join in or start something on their own. I wanted to pair up or mob with others to learn more in an easier and faster way. Also, I realized that the time investment for any next pact probe had to be lower than for the last one so that I would have more time to focus on the learning itself - not forgetting having more time for myself as well to rest and relax. Here's what I came up with.
The probe:
  • I practice programming by doing different kind of coding exercises and challenges. The tasks can be anything that triggers my interest, on any topic, with their size ranging from small to medium, and solved in any programming language that deems suitable. Examples for exercises might be a hackrrank challenge, a coding kata, automating tests on any level, adding a new feature to an existing application.
  • I share my progress and results publicly on my GitHub account whenever feasible. Overall I publish at least five repositories, no matter how small.
  • I ask for collaboration and learning partners either to practice together with me on the chosen challenges, or to provide their feedback so I can increase my knowledge and skills. While doing so, this does not hold me back from working on the challenges on my own at any time as well.
  • Whenever I gained the confidence to do so, I start building an application from scratch. The objective is to have created a small product providing basic functionality, serving as proof of concept that my skills evolved and my confidence to tackle these kind of coding challenges increased.
I know there's a lot more to programming and developing than just mere coding skills. A lot of knowledge is involved as well, about architecture, design patterns, core language concepts and more. While I might hopefully learn about them on my way, this is not my focus for this challenge. My goal here is not to become a developer but to hone the skills in my toolbox to support my testing.

This time I added another section to the probe design: pause criteria. End of 2017 I had already realized how much time I had invested in fulfilling my pact. Still, I have taken up even more challenges in 2018. At the latest conferences I attended this year, people talked a lot more about mental health and the importance to be kind to ourselves and take time to rest. As I see the importance of this topic, I defined a personal limit I shall not cross. The biggest personal indicator and therefore the warning sign I definitely know of is this: if I don't play computer games anymore - which I adore! - I shall take a break and do exactly that, play computer games. Do it for pure entertainment and rest from challenges, without any pressure involved.
Pause criteria:
  • Have you played any non-casual computer game this week? If not, stop whatever you're doing, rest, then play. Continue only three days later with the challenge. (Only exception: conference weeks.)
The probe starts earliest at the time this blog post is published. It is over as soon as any of below exit criteria apply, whichever comes first, and will then get evaluated.
Exit criteria:
  • The target had been achieved.
  • It's November 1st.
  • I had to pause the probe for the 15th time, indicating a severe lack of balance requiring a re-prioritization of the things I do in my life.

Influence(r)s

After I formulated my pact challenge for 2018, I realized that I had been heavily influenced by several people. I believe that we get inspired by others around us most times and we can only be glad when we see who triggered our ideas and endeavors so we can give them the credit they deserve. I cannot claim that below list is complete, still, I'd like to highlight those inspiring people and situations I am aware of.
  • Richard Bradshaw's and Mark Winteringham's tutorial "Let’s Take Automated Checking Beyond WebDriver" back at Agile Testing Days 2016 was one of the triggers from the last years. Fun fact: Toyer attended the tutorial as well, we even worked together in one group! This tutorial triggered me to finally create my own GitHub account - because it seemed everyone else had one and I thought maybe it's really about time to start mine as well. Sad fact: Ever since I have not had the courage to make use of it. Now, next year in April I'll be at TestBash Brighton and I decided to take the pre-event course "Automation in Testing". I'd love to be prepared for this.
  • Blanché Carstens started the #100DaysOfCode challenge mid of this year. I had seen this challenge a few times now in my Twitter timeline. It sounded really intriguing, and yet I shied away from tweeting daily about my progress. Ever since I wondered whether there might be another way for me.
  • In one of the monthly meetups of our agile testing community at my company, we had watched Maaret Pyhäjärvi's keynote "Intersection of Automation and Exploratory Testing" at SeleniumConf India 2018. This talk was very well received and inspired people to think differently about exploratory testing and automation. For me personally, Maaret is one of the best examples who sees herself rather coming from the exploratory testing side and yet clearly emphasizes how essential programming skills are, also for exploring. After all, test automation fits in nicely in her box of exploratory testing.
  • In this very talk, Maaret named Angie Jones as her figurative counterpart, looking at test automation as the main thing, where exploratory testing fits in. I had the opportunity to experience Angie's way of teaching test automation in her tutorial "Advanced Automation for Agile: UI, Web Services, and BDD" at CAST 2018. In my blog post about the tutorial you can read the following: "It felt good to learn that I know more than I thought I would. That I could easily follow and still had time to help others, and was able to do so." So what's it to be feared? In addition, Angie invited me to participate in the Test Automation University next year. I made clear that I'm no automation expert, and yet Angie encouraged me to teach how you can get it done even if no one on your team is an automation expert. I took a leap and agreed, so watch out for the course coming out presumably mid of March next year.
  • My dear teammate Olha Fil is a major inspiration for me as well. She keeps reminding me that most challenges are best solved together, basically any sort of task. Olha is really engaged in pair testing complex stories with me and teaches me with the most patience and kindness when pair programming. It's a pleasure learning with and from each other. She's my bastion of calm reminding me not to do things alone, while at the same time encouraging me to tackle my chosen challenge. As she said, although it will be painful at the beginning, anything is possible, and I really only need to practice, so just do it. She was the one to raise my attention to the point that increasing the confidence in my skills should be the main factor to evaluate the probe on. Also, she ensured me that I can always reach out to her and ask her about anything. Thank you so much!
  • When I had Marianne Duijst pairing with me on my testing tour on the topic of automation, I was so glad to share the knowledge I had about tools like the command line, the IDE we used, Cucumber and more. There are two things here: first, I was super happy I could share knowledge in areas I would not deem myself super knowledgable. Second, Marianne is just super inspiring all around. Just in recent weeks she took up her own challenge to dive deeper into code, reaching out for lovely people like Marit van Dijk for support, and tackling the Advent of Code challenge this year. My greatest respect goes out to her! 
  • And last but not least, Toyer Mamoojee, my learning partner himself, is the one I want to thank the most for being a constant source of inspiration. If I were to use the analogy, I'd say Toyer and I are forming a similar pair as Angie and Maaret do. Toyer is firstly focusing on automation and adding in exploration; and I'm coming from the exploratory testing side of things and am aiming to add more automation in. It's very inspiring what he did using his unique skillset over the past years, like teaching technical testing to testers in his company, sharing how he combined automation with mind map visualizations, and much more. To add to that: I am certain that he will be a great mentor and feedback giver in this challenge!

Adding New Challenges to Existing Ones

The thing is: I plan to still work on other topics as well. I will still blog, another challenge from 2016 I haven't mentioned anymore. My initial challenge of public speaking really kicked off and I'm eager to build on that. My testing tour resulted into more informal hands-on pairing sessions, like monthly security testing sessions with Peter Kofler. In addition, I really want to share my knowledge again more within my company, for example by offering cross-team mob sessions to learn with and from each other. For our global community I committed to tackle my fear of doing teaching videos by doing a course for Test Automation University. If you have read my raw notes above, you'll find the last points on the list as well, and yet I chose a different one as my major challenge next year.

To add to all that, my new pact for 2019 is in itself two challenges in one. It's about tackling my fears when it comes to coding, while still keeping my health indicator in view and taking care of myself. As Alex Schladebeck and Huib Schoots shared in their Agile Testing Days 2018 keynote, this is the only way we can add value.

To conclude, a new pact is born: let's become #CodeConfident!
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Thursday, December 6, 2018

Testing United 2018 - My First Keynote

Right after returning home from Agile Testing Days 2018 I packed my things again and went to the lovely city of Bratislava for Testing United; the conference that invited me to give my very first keynote. A colleague of mine accompanied me for the conference. We arrived the day before, got welcomed by the organizers and enjoyed a nice lunch together with two other speakers. The evening offered a private sightseeing tour through the old city of Bratislava as well as a lovely speakers dinner where I could already get to know further people. My keynote was scheduled as second session of the first conference day and I was really glad about having it early. On the one hand this helped calm my nerves, and on the other hand I had caught a cold the week before, so I wanted to get the keynote done before it got too bad to deliver a proper talk. The day came, and indeed felt nervous right before the keynote, however, I always did before any of the sessions I gave so far. What I learned on my speaking journey is to prepare for that and that I am then able to cope with the situation on stage. For the first keynote, it was exactly the same. And then it was done! I felt really relieved afterwards. I mean, achievement unlocked, right? It was great to get some nice feedback on it from the people I talked with during the rest of the conference. My job was not done yet though. For the second conference day a panel discussion with all keynote speakers was scheduled. Honestly, I do not like panel discussions as they provide lots of uncertainty how they go. Also, my cold had grown worse. But well, I made it through, and then I was finally really done! Now, what about the rest of the program? I made quite some sketchnoting experience on the last three conferences and I was committed to keep at it. So here are my notes of the sessions I attended. Well, the conference was over - so what to do? I found a nice small dinner group with Raluca Morariu, her partner and Roy Boven and really enjoyed our conversation in a low key setting to close the conference in a personal way.

What I really liked about the conference was that they provided plenty of opportunities to socialize and have conversations with the people. The venue was great for that, breaks had a perfect length, they offered a free networking party on the evening of the first conference day - and all that was always accompanied by amazing food, and plenty of it. (Yes, I will remember the food at any conference.)

In case you'd like to get further impressions yourself, check out the official photo album or the talk recordings that will get published on the Testing United YouTube channel.
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Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Agile Testing Days 2018 - Wonderful Unicorn Season

Agile Testing Days 2018 ended over two weeks ago, and yet I instantly get this very special conference feeling just when thinking of it. I know I'm biased when it comes to this conference as it was my very first one. To add to that I made many new friends there, the inspiration I drew from it changed my life, and it feels more and more like magic each year. The best thing, however, is that others share this impression!
Here are my experiences of the 2018 edition, the conference's 10th anniversary. Although this post became lengthy it cannot do this week full of inspiration justice in any way; and yet I hope it gives an impression.

Meeting Friends Old and New

This year I met Maria Kedemo and Tom Roden at the airport so I did not have to go to the venue alone. What luxury to share a taxi along with stories, getting into the conference mood already. Arriving at the hotel we met the next familiar faces and the next stories were shared. It was great spending the first evening with lots of the amazing people from the Women in Testing slack that I am part of.

Seeing my learning partner Toyer Mamoojee again in real life was simply awesome, as always! It's great we have so frequent video calls but they cannot replace meeting in real life. Also, so many people of the power learning group Toyer and I started were around as well! Lovely to meet João Proença, Viktorija Manevska, Lilit Sharkhatunyan, and Pooja Shah in person again. That not being enough, I also had the chance to meet several people I paired with on my testing tour like Thomas Rinke, Guna Petrova, Claire Reckless, and Marianne Duijst. Lisa Crispin, who introduced me to the community in the first place. And Alex Schladebeck, who won this year's MIATPP = Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person award! Congrats Alex, you very well deserved it. Several of my former and current colleagues attended the conference for their first time. I'm really glad they enjoyed our trip to unicorn land just as much as I did. One of them even won the first price of the costume contest and therefore a free ticket for next year's conference! How awesome is that?
DSC_8295.jpg
I cannot name them all, but I've also met again many people from past editions of Agile Testing Days, as well as made new connections. I'm thankful for them all.

With all those great people I had lots of great conversations and I wished I would have had more time for every single one of them. So many stories shared, lessons learned, a lot of feedback received, and much more inspiration to take home. I said it already so many times, and I'm going to say it again: it's all about the people.

A Theme, and It's Precious

The program of this conference can only be described as huge. Every year the fear of missing out is gets bigger, and yet we have to decide between 10+ tracks or giving ourselves a bit of rest. This conference goes the whole week from early hours until early hours again, nearly around the clock. Getting rest and sleep is essential and yet there are so many wonderful people to have inspiring and thoughtful conversations with which makes it hard to find a good personal balance. Complaining on a very high level here!

Although the program is huge, there is still a sort of theme each year. João Proença shared in his great blog post that last year it was "What does the future look like for testers?" whereas this year the focus was on "What should we be paying attention to now in ourselves?". I absolutely agree with him. Many sessions addressed diversity, inclusion, mental health, psychological safety, biases, learning, mentoring, teaching as well as our creative, critical, and lateral thinking skills. Yes, it's a testing conference! And all this is what we need to grow as testers and hone our testing skills. So many so much needed messages and exercises.

By the way, when it comes to diversity and representation, these conference organizers really do their homework, and their efforts are reflected in a very diverse speaker lineup and audience.

What a Week

In the following are the sessions I've attended, including the sketchnotes I did wherever I had the time and energy to do them. Knowing how overwhelming the 5 days of 10+ tracks of Agile Testing Days can be, I mostly chose workshops this time, adding in only a few talks here and there. Though it's really sad I couldn't hear all those other great talks, this strategy worked out well for me this time to not overload myself, get a lot out of the official program, and get even more out of the informal socializing opportunities and conversations throughout this testing festival. By the way, many speakers shared their slides, several people wrote own blog posts, shared photos and more, it's worth to check them out as well.

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday


The conclusion is clear: see you next year!

Yes, this conference is expensive, and yes, it's absolutely worth it. So it really does make sense to apply as speaker or volunteer or use the conference budget in case you have one. I know one thing for sure: I am going to find a way to get to the 2019 edition as well. So see you next year back in unicorn land!
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