Showing posts with label ensemble. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ensemble. Show all posts

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Contributing in New Ways - Everything Everywhere All at Once

It's been a while since I last wrote down my thoughts about things that happened, things I've done, things that evolved. And a lot had happened since beginning of the year when I announced my personal challenge for 2024. I would have loved to share a lot more frequently about my endeavors in small social media snippets, yet the last months had been not only busy but energy-draining (due to other aspects). There simply wasn't any energy left to share what I'm doing, and I rather spent the energy available on the doing itself.

As I'm slowly getting back to a more sustainable pace, and back to the kind of busy that I personally like and that gives me energy instead of just taking it, I'm finally ready to share a few things.

So, how did I contribute in new ways in the last months?

 

New Work Contributions

At work, I completed my first backend feature. I've worked on the backend before, yet rather focusing on cleaning up legacy, adding tests, improving things, adapting existing features. Yet I simply never had the opportunity before to add a completely new feature. We currently only have one dedicated backend engineer in the team, so I'm once again filling a gap. Admittedly, a gap that I really like and am way more familiar with than with other endeavors.

I gave a bunch of company-wide learning sessions again, this time experimenting with two new formats. One on offering a dedicated public learning hour on all things security, one on sharing stories from my own team to initiate conversations how to grow the culture we want to see. Both formats were planned as a series of at least five sessions. Both had high quality (though low quantity) audiences so far, and people could take things with them after each session. I am calling that a success.

I've also learned a lot more about very domain-specific compliance topics, processes, audits, and more. These are not topics I'm keen on jumping on (especially compared to the other two), yet it's been another gap to fill and another contribution in a new way.


New Conference Contributions

Speaking at conferences is not a new thing for me anymore. What can be new, however, are new formats, new teaching styles, new session topics, new conferences, and new communities.

I decided to go for new topics and finally submitted my first security-focused conference sessions. I was thinking about this for a long time already, basically ever since I started to invest in security knowledge and skills. Yet it's an especially scary area to step into, and that accounts for conference sessions as well.

I managed to write three new proposals, two workshops and a talk. Two sessions are still waiting for the first conference to give feedback on, one is already accepted! I'll have the honor to give my brand-new "Capture the Flag Together: Security for Everyone" workshop at the free Software Teaming Online Conference 2024. And Lisa Crispin agreed to co-facilitate with me! It's going to be a lot of fun. I just love this conference, and I owe a lot to it. Fun fact, my all-time most booked workshop "Ensemble Exploratory Testing" also has its roots there. Very curious what happens to my new security workshop in the future, and in general to more security-focused sessions. At least the first step is done!


New Community Contributions

Finally, my courageous community contributions! So much to share from the very start. Right after having posted my personal challenge of the year, yet another initiative evolved. I can tell you I'm so very excited about everything. Depending on the initiative, I cannot always share everything publicly right away, yet there's enough to share already!

  • Launch an open space security conference together with Claudia Bothe, Claudius Link, Dave van Stein, Janina Nemec, and Ulrich Viefhaus. The TL;DR version: it's happening for real! The Open Security Conference (#osco) will take place on 4-6 October 2024 in Rückersbach, near Frankfurt in Germany. A lot more folks joined as organizers since I last wrote about this initiative. We have further awesome supporters in the closer circle as well. Our website is public (and constant work in progress), first social media presences initiated on Mastodon and LinkedIn. Have you seen our amazing logo created by Janina Nemec? The event will be a full open space conference with the addition of two keynotes to kick it off - one amazing and well-known speaker is already confirmed. We're looking for sponsors, if you have a suggestion for us it's appreciated! Well, a lot more is coming and to be revealed as we go further. There's a ton of more work to be done, this initiative is indeed not getting boring at all. Instead, it's very exciting, and I'm really happy to have such a great organizer team to take this journey with!
  • Create a security card game together with Martin Schmidt and Philipp Zug. This endeavor took shape as well over the last months. We already had a play session, trying out the game for the very first time. It was such a cool experience to test out the preliminary content and experiment with different game mechanics. And it instantly generated lots of more ideas to improve on. This is a really chill and fun activity and we hope to bring it to open space conferences and the world. Check out our Security Card Game Github org in case you want to follow along.
  • Build a full-stack open-source practice platform as an ensemble with Ben Dowen and Vernon Richards. Yet another initiative I feel very hyped up about! We are taking the roles of the employees of the fictive company "Make-Believe Labs", taking on "Project Snack Shop" for a customer who wants to digitalize their well-running snack shop business by offering an online shop. For real, I just love this happening. We have an ensemble session each week, and we are all in. From our own vision, to the actual project offer and context, to the first proof of concepts, to team agreements, to design documents, to architectural decision records, exploring walking skeleton options with code, and more. This is just super awesome. We have so many ideas to build on this! We don't have an overarching Github org for this yet to follow along, but stay tuned, a lot more is brewing already.
  • Offer Shiva Krishnan's and my leadership workshop series to the community. Ah, a longtime endeavor dear to our hearts. This series proved to be valuable to lots of people in the past, and it definitely helped both us grow immensely. Finally, the time has come to spread the word further and transform our workshops to an open community offer. This year we want to try it out with a small cohort. In the first instance, we won't have public registrations, yet will build on our networks for this first community proof of concept. If this goes well, there are plans for more afterwards! It's now really taking shape, and I'm glad to see this. Although access won't be public in the first instance, I'll see what I can share as we go along.

By the way, as if any one of the above wouldn't be enough (they clearly are), there are still further endeavors on my list that I'd love to start. I know, I know, I can't do everything at once, so I deliberately hold back for the moment, as above initiatives (as you can imagine) already fill my time very easily. They also give lots of energy! Lots of growth, too, and I'm not alone in either of them.

As I'm writing this, I'm looking back to the original hypothesis for my personal challenge. While above endeavors are indeed new contributions, quite courageous and also ambitious, I'm also very pleased to see that the hypothesis criteria will be very easy to measure indeed. I won't have any trouble to learn from these initiatives. Seems I'm on the right track, and that's providing me peace of mind already.

I am very much looking forward to see how each of these new contributions evolves over time. Truly exciting!

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Thursday, February 25, 2021

Creating the Space for People to Learn Together

A few weeks ago, a colleague reached out to me. They looked for input on how to make a new approach successful within their domain. They knew I experimented a lot with various collaborative approaches in teams. Therefore, they asked me for advice and ideas how they could set things up in a way that teams have a fun time, people learn together, and the whole thing has a chance to become successful. Today I learned that the input was valuable to them and they included it in their concept, so I decided to share it publicly as well. Please note that I've learned a lot of this from other people who added to my own experience, like Maaret Pyhäjärvi and Woody Zuill, so lots of credit go to them.

The most important thing I learned from enabling people to learn together: creating a safe and inclusive space for learning is crucial. This starts with inviting everyone in at times they can make (considering people like parents or caretakers have a difficult life to balance and we all have a pandemic ongoing, too) and making a point everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or what they bring to the table. When we're learning together we will have to show what we know and especially what we don't know yet (yet!). This can trigger lots of uncomfortable feelings, especially if you're not used to learning together (and most of us grew up in systems where learning together was rather discouraged and this runs deep) and if you're likely to fail. Failure is part of learning (love the acronym FAIL - first attempt in learning), yet many of us first need to unlearn that failure is a bad thing per se. Make it clear it's okay to be uncomfortable, it's okay to fail and learn from it; it's not okay to make it unsafe for people to feel uncomfortable.

One way to set the scene is to set some ground rules we all agree on before starting, making them bilateral. I love the guidelines and principles I learned from ensemble programming (formerly known as mob programming), which I use in many of my workshops. See also my Miro board to introduce the ensemble approach.

  • You're in the right place if you're either contributing or learning.
  • You have two ideas what to do next or more? Bias to action, try them out both. It's a good idea to try out the one from the more unexperienced person first.
  • Use the rule from improvisational theater: "yes, and ..."; don't destroy each other's ideas but build upon each other's ideas.
  • We cannot know where people are coming from, so let's treat each other with kindness, consideration and respect.

An additional way to create a safe space is to be vulnerable ourselves, especially if we're holding a privileged position (e.g. as facilitators, hosts, experts, experienced persons). If we show it's fine to say we don't know, we're curious to learn, we learn from everyone (no matter how unexperienced they are), we set the stage and evolve the culture we want to see. Small things matter, language matters a lot. For example: "Oh you don't know that?! Everyone knows that." or "Oh but that's easy." - these messages can come across belittling and hence can cause harm. Instead we can say: "Great, here's a learning opportunity! I offer to walk you through."

To make group sessions more inclusive, be sure to hold space for all kinds of people and balance their speaking time. Loud voices that frequently talk need to learn to hold back and create space for others, quiet voices need to get the space to contribute and learn that they are welcome to do so as well. Observing communication patterns and dynamics can help immensely; some groups need more facilitation from outside, others already learned to be balance this out themselves better. Language plays an important role here as well. Make an active effort to avoid stereotypes and use neutral language (e.g. gender-neutral language; no matter the group you're working with).

To make a learning session fun and energizing, it's best to make it as hands-on as possible for everyone. We all learn in different ways, yet for work related scenarios, hands-on learning is so far the best approach I've experienced with groups. To make things hands-on, it's a good idea to take turns at the keyboard. Beware that this can be a very uncomfortable situation for some people, yet if it's safe the learning effect is massive. Also, it will allow facilitators to observe where people stumble, where they lack local setups and tooling, where they find new approaches, if they understood what the group is up to, to uncover implicit knowledge, and more. To facilitate this remotely, either work on something everyone has the same access to and they can switch easily so screen sharing alone works, or stay on the same computer and share screen control.

Be intentional about how the group navigates, i.e. who knows the next step to go, who keeps the big picture in mind. Whoever navigates has to think and speak out loud, and practice how to communicate well. They explain the intention behind the next steps; if that does not help yet, then location and details can help; yet the intention why we go this step is crucial for learning and sharing the mental model. If you combine the navigator role with being at the keyboard (usually called the driver), this can be a lot of cognitive load for this person and all others might easily loose track. If you split this task from the keyboard and have the driver taking instructions and taking care of implementation details while the rest of the group navigates, this can work well in mature teams where they learned not to speak over each other and give each other space; yet people new to this might not do too well. If you have the driver at the keyboard and another person practicing the navigator role, taking input and suggestions from the rest of the group, people have a good chance to learn together. At first this might feel artificial and slower, yet it allows for more thoughtful thinking, clearer communication and deeper learning. Things will speed up naturally. Having an expert on the group who knows a lot more than others (might be you), you can consider to take over navigation from time to time to unblock the group; yet you can also consider to navigate the navigator instead of navigating yourself, which is once again a learning opportunity for them.

Making things fun is a tricky thing. Learning itself can be fun already, learning together with great people as well, just as solving a tricky problem. So might be that fun evolves naturally given the structures you provide. One approach you can try in addition is to gamify the session, especially if you'd like to run more of them. However, beware not to make this competitive and compare people within the team or teams with other teams. Instead, have the whole team work together on a goal (as they're also supposed to in the real case), and measure something that matters to the group (they can set their goal themselves so they have a say and are invested). After the first session they then have historical data they can compare themselves to after the second session. We can only compare ourselves to ourselves in the past as no one else shares the same context; and if we do so we can make our own learning more visible and tangible. After all, practice does make all of us better.

A few more things: it's a good idea to start with why we do this, why it's an important investment, what's the desired outcome. Make it clear this is part of work as learning time is part of working time. Depending on the length of the session, allow for good recreational breaks where they are not supposed to work on anything else but take a real break for body and mind. Depending on the length, allowing snacks might help as well (especially as people have different eating habits and needs).

Hope this helps. :)

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Sunday, February 14, 2021

Ensemble Is the New Mob

Back in 2017, my team gave "mob programming" a try, a collaborative approach to product development that was new to us back then. We made really good experiences so that I started to spread the word and introduced more teams and people at my company to this social approach. I started giving workshops and talks about it, I initiated cross-team groups learning together using this approach, I enjoyed any opportunity in my free time where I could hone my skills in a group, I even joined the program team for the Mob Programming Conference to get practitioners together and gain new ones. Always talking about a mob, only interchanging the activity depending on where our focus was: mob programming, mob testing, mob documentation writing, mob presentation crafting, and so on.

Over the years, the concept became more known across teams at my company. Mental models of what it entailed differed, yet people acknowledged that solo work or pairing weren't the only options, they realized you can also get work done synchronously in a group setting. They saw benefits and several people built upon the idea and tried the approach in various contexts, from learning settings to solving a real problem at hand, from on demand initiatives to a full time working mode.

Beginning of February, one colleague from another team shared an observation with me. They noticed I was speaking about an "ensemble" these days instead of the "mob". They were curious to learn about the background of this switch and if both terms referred to the same approach. It really made me smile - what a great learning opportunity! For everyone who might have had the same question, here's what I answered.

Both terms "ensemble" and "mob" refer to the same approach. People had been looking for a replacement term for many years to get rid of the negative connotations of the "mob" which was perceived as problematic. Many people had been appalled by the term "mob" and hence didn't want to give it a try. Thinking of bullying or lynch mobs, the term is triggering trauma. Since last year we now finally have a new term that's a lot more inclusive: the ensemble. It's already been taken up and lived by many leading experts like Emily Bache and Lisa Crispin. The term was found by Maaret Pyhäjärvi and Denise Yu and you can read more about the origins in Maaret's blog post introducing the ensemble.

Personally, I made the switch in September 2020 when giving my talk "A Story of Mob Programming, Testing, and Everything" (nowadays "A Story of Ensemble Programming, Testing, and Everything") for the Agile Testing Days webinar series. This is the talk where you can hear my own take on why the terms you choose are impactful and how changing our language can reduce harm.

Inside my company, I haven't been actively advertising the term switch. I just continuously used ensemble as the new one; sometimes adding "formerly known as mob" to make it easier for people to know which approach I was referring to. Given this, I was really happy when my colleague asked me about the term ensemble, appreciated my explanation, and shared they will introduce the new term to their team in which they frequently use the approach.

Language allows us to express ourselves, and it shapes the understanding of our world. Language matters. Changing my language to the term ensemble is a little thing to do for me and matters a lot to someone else (kudos to Gitte Klitgaard for such wisdom). So, ensemble it is.
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Sunday, November 15, 2020

Agile Testing Days 2020 - Recharging My Batteries

Joining the Agile Testing Days at the end of the year was always a blast and a real energy booster for me. This year, the conference was forced to go online, and I wondered how it would be. I might have shared it before, I'm rather skeptical regarding online conferences. While I love the fact that remote makes attending conferences a lot more accessible, I personally feel online events drain my energy more while I'm not getting the same benefits from them as if they would be on-site. I really miss the hallway tracks, the informal casual conversations, having food together, the social hours after the official program ended, maybe even going sightseeing together. From all these informal situations I learned so much, drew a lot of inspiration, and gained wonderful friends and a lot of connections in the community. The only online conference so far that made me feel re-connected with the community was TestBash Home earlier this year; shout-out to the wonderful people at Ministry of Testing!

This was a very unusual and rough year. It had and still has a toll on everyone, on many people dis-proportionally higher than on me due to my high level of privilege. If I already feel it and go through a (rather smooth) roller-coaster ride, how must it be for those with less privileges? Here's where I learn so much from stories told by other people, especially those systemically underrepresented. Even in my lived experience, I felt in need of refueling my energy.

Back to the Agile Testing Days 2020 online edition. First of all: many thanks to the wonderful organizers to make it happen at all, many thanks for putting so much effort and mindfulness into making it happen, and many thanks for making it a great experience despite all the issues that only surface when you bring a product to production. You did a great job to solve or work around them quickly. Cheers to you! Super grateful.


The Highlights: Community Magic

The first day had me starting quite tired, yet eager to see if the magical Agile Testing Days community spirit would be alive and kicking also virtually. And it worked! Seeing so many people in the talk chats and all the tweets flowing on Twitter really drew me into the zone. All this crowned by the announcement of the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person (MIATPP) 2020, the wonderful and ever inspiring Angie Jones!!! So glad this community award finally went to Angie after her being on the top voted list for years. Well, I might be biased here as I repeatedly voted for her myself - yet I'm convinced I'm not the only one thinking this was overdue. Here's what I wrote to nominate her. Angie, in case you're reading this: thank you once again for everything.

Angie did so much for our testing community. She's sharing her wisdom every day with us, on Twitter, her blog, touring the world and more. She's an amazing presenter and wonderful workshop instructor. She continuously promotes the importance of automation and testing and how to do it well.

Angie has been super influential for a long time already. Last year, she took it to the next level, advocating for all of us when she brought Test Automation University to life. This was a stroke of genius! She got so many world class instructors on board and really engaged the community to learn and go beyond. 

There are so many more reasons why Angie should finally get the MIATPP award, yet one thing deserves emphasis on top of all this. Angie was key to me waking up to what's happening in the world. To not only see the systems of oppression, systemic racism in specifics, but also to act on what I see and start dismantling it. What she shared, her own lived experiences as well as those of many others, triggered me to move; to go ahead on my lifelong journey of learning more and doing better. It's clearly up to me now, yet still: Angie, I cannot thank you enough.

Right after the award "ceremony" (what a pity we couldn't really celebrate Angie all together on-site as she would have deserved it!) it was bar chat night. Alex Schladebeck hosted one of them which draw me right in. It was lovely hanging out with people even just virtually, seeing known and new faces and hearing about their lives and experiences. This strengthened the re-connection to the community and got me looking forward to the next days even more.

Yet my absolute community highlight was the evening of the second day. Party time for some, PowerPoint karaoke and pub quiz for others. I chose to again hang out informally with people, looking for new connections or strengthening old ones. For this purpose, the conference organizers did not offer a usual conference call setting, yet used a Gather town instead. I haven't come across this tool before and was delighted to discover it! Entering the town, you get a tiny avatar and are placed on an isometric world map looking a lot like a retro game. You can wander around the map and as you meet other people, our video feeds get active and we can talk with each other. If you wander off too far away, you cannot overhear conversations anymore. Mimicking the real world situation! Bonus point: it's free for groups up to 25 people.

At first I found myself in the need of exploring the tool, I was not ready for interaction yet. Yet then some familiar faces popped in and we started to explore the tool together which was a lot of fun.

More and more people joined and we figured this was coming as close to the real conference on-site feeling as it could! Groups formed and dissolved quite naturally, conversations evolved on one topic and moved on to others. We figured if we start our own map we could enable the builder mode and customize our map, even add interactive tools like whiteboards or games. We ended up with playing the game Set online with each other and had great fun! Really, I haven't had so much fun in the virtual for a long time. And the evening wasn't over yet. I had to leave the group for about an hour due to a dry run for my workshop the next morning, yet just like on an on-site conference, I came back and looked whether there would be still people around and up for a conversation. I actually found them! Thanks to my dear friend João Proença for sticking around and inviting me over to the late nighters talk. Also here, once more I felt the spirit of Agile Testing Days. I knew I had to call it a night to be reasonable, yet I simply didn't want to leave the conversation just yet. So I stayed up way longer than intended and had to pay for that the days afterwards. Still don't regret it a bit.
The only sad thing: not too many people from our power learning group could attend this year. They were deeply missed, especially my learning partner Toyer Mamoojee. With those who could join, we didn't find enough time to connect. Well, we will have a dedicated call in a few weeks and re-live Agile Testing Days just for us.

The Program: A Mix of Everything

This year I chose to stick with my own commitment of being kind to myself and not creating sketchnotes for online talks. Although I do like creating sketchnotes and sharing them, I feel they only help me in real life settings. When I'm in front of a computer anyways, I take digital notes. Also, this decision allowed me to keep up with Twitter more in time so I didn't need follow that urge at the end of the day when I'm already exhausted. Still, if you'd like to see sketchnotes, check out the ones created by Ekaterina Budnikov, Eveline Moolenaars, Katja Piroué and Konners Brai.

When at on-site conferences, I tend to attend workshops whenever I can and hope they will be really hands-on and full of interactive exercises. I learn a lot by engaging and experiencing things myself. I feel these are the situations I cannot just replay as I can do with talk recordings. That being said, of course hearing a talk live together with other people is a huge difference compared to watching a recording alone. Still, I wanted to make time for workshops as much as I could also for the online edition of Agile Testing Days. Here are the sessions I ended up attending live.

Day 1:

  • Keynote: It's Always About You by José Díaz. José ended up jumping in with a backup keynote as Daniël Maslyn who was scheduled for the opening keynote faced connection issues. In hindsight, I really loved this happening, it was amazing! This was a very personal and vulnerable story showing how José became the person he is today. It was the perfect keynote to open the conference; no matter if it was a backup or not. Really triggered lots of thoughts. Super inspiring, setting the tone for the conference.
  • Testing Tour: My journey of Pairing and Learning by Parveen Khan. I just love that Parveen is sharing the story of her testing tour, pairing up with people and learning a lot together. From what I observed she inspired a lot more people to step outside their comfort zones on their journeys. Just awesome!
  • Being a tester after trying almost everything else by João Proença. Loved it! So many lessons learned in different positions over the years, there's lots of wisdom to draw from. Great reminder that everything we learn can help us with testing. By the way, did you know João is an amazing musician? Check out Marty Was Right (also available on Spotify)!
  • Keynote: Automation Addiction by Huib Schoots and Paul Holland. What is automation, really? How did this fixation on test automation evolve and how to see the symptoms? Great keynote on why we cannot automate everything and we shouldn't. Automation can do a lot for us, yet automating too much, automating the wrong things, or maintaining ineffective automation hurts. We need a comprehensive strategy supported by the whole team.
  • Workshop: Security Games by Marianne Rady, Claudius Link and Matthias Altmann. I learned new ways of engaging participants using a Miro board. I got to know about a security game I wasn't aware of yet: OWASP Cornucopia. I could get my toes wet with the Elevation of Privilege (EoP) Threat Modeling Card Game. Besides that, I learned about the difficulties to make security accessible to a wide variety of people.
  • Keynote: Level Up: Playing the Automation Game by Angie Jones. A-ma-zing. As always. Thank you Angie for sharing your wisdom! Really dropped gems here, once again. This time, transferring what she learned from game design to automation. Also: loved the video of young Angie playing city bingo!
Day 2:
  • Keynote: Testing is not the goal! by Rob Meaney. So much wisdom condensed in one talk. And the messages cannot be emphasized enough: "life is too short to build software that does not matter and too short to inflict harm on people", "build organizations and teams obsessed with learning", "design systems together that can be safely adapted based on what we learned", "optimize for a great whole team experience to get happy productive teams working in successful, innovative businesses delivering valuable software to satisfied customers". Definitely check out all the great work Rob does! Especially when in need of mental models, Rob has a real knack for them.
  • Workshop: Put testing on the map by Wouter Lagerweij. Wouter prepared great visualizations to help us have meaningful conversations on different kinds of tests and how they fit to different parts of our system, process or pipeline. He pointed out to make sure to have a shared definition on the terminology used for tests, no matter which one.
  • Keynote: 8 Bit Pro - A gamer's guide to testing by Dan Billing. I had listened to this talk last year already, and loved the latest version even better. Besides showing how any product needs to provide value using the example of games, Dan even had the whole audience playing Lemmings with him! Really energizing and fun. Also, I really appreciate his plead for increased diversity and inclusion right after his talk.
  • Workshop: TDD with You, You, You, and Me by Zeb Ford-Reitz and Mira Kottmann. This was an amazing workshop, really grateful for the experience. I loved the theory part, they made it really easy to follow by providing very clear and helpful explanations. I especially loved the workshop part which was really hands-on! It's just great working in an ensemble, learning and practicing together. Big kudos for Mira and Zeb for being really kind and mindful. I felt very welcome.
  • Dear Mrs Aquafresh: Bottling this girl’s confidence by Clare Norman. Wonderful story, and especially wonderful storytelling! Incredible job for a first-time speaker. Clare shared a very personal story on how she re-built lost confidence as an adult while she had a lot of confidence as a child. She reminded us to be - us. Not cool or normal, the weird us that we are. To let our inner child out in while. To decide ourselves where to spend our courage on, to put our own stamp on everything we do, and to celebrate that. From my observations many people saw themselves in her story. I really hope more people get the chance to learn from her experiences, they'd be in for a treat.
  • Keynote: bAd-gile: The Online Gameshow by Huib Schoots, Alex Schladebeck and Bart Knaack. What a great idea! Didn't know what to expect from this keynote but I loved it. They had two teams playing impossible games before the keynote, recorded the outcomes and shared their observations. Then it was time for the audience to do the same! They even asked them on stage to share their own moments when agile had gone completely wrong or misunderstood. This was entertaining, engaging, fun - and also inspirational. Have to try out those game ideas back at work!
Day 3:
  • Keynote: Beyond the bugs by Rick Tracy. Interesting look at how testers are perceived by different people and how they see themselves. The one thing in common: they find bugs. Yet there's a lot more what testers do and how they provide value. Rick went so far to even calculate their impact in concrete money value. Impressive.
  • Keynote: Let it go by Nicola Sedgwick. What a wonderful personal story to close Agile Testing Days. Nicole learned lots of lessons about testing and quality on her way. She encouraged testers to let go: of testing as a role, of defining themselves by the quality of their systems, of perfection, of the defensiveness that if they're not testing they're not contributing. Let's embrace the coaching aspect, learning new skills and experimentation. Very relatable story, inspiring us for the future.
I had planned to attend another workshop on the third day on accessibility testing yet found myself too exhausted after my own session so I decided to take a break instead.

From what I've seen on Twitter, there had been several talks that looked very insightful: personal mental health stories, talks on effectivity and productivity, and important aspects like biases and ethnics in testing. Good to know the recordings are there for me to catch up!

The Excitement: Our Own Sessions

This time I facilitated two sessions. Lucky me - I was not alone for either of them! I paired on creating a pairing workshop, I ensembled on creating ensemble workshops. Just in the spirit of what we wanted to have our participants experience. Also, these had been first-timers for me as I did pair on workshops before, I did remote workshops before, yet I never had both combined. Also, both session concepts were brand-new, world premiers so to say. Experiments in themselves and to be incrementally refined as we go, as we definitely aim to give those sessions at further conferences in the future.

The "Extreme Pairing" workshop that I had the honor to prepare and facilitate together with the wonderful Simon Berner was something I had on my ideas list for a longer time. Thanks so much Simon for making this happen together with me! We started scheming this since May when the conference was still planned as on-site conference yet we knew this could change any time. Just as it did; first to a hybrid for a small on-site crowd and a virtual audience, now as completely online conference. Looking back, it was a great decision that Simon and I decided very early on to make our workshop feasible to do remotely from the start. Our rationale was that for a pairing workshop, even the on-site setting would require people to sit far from each other with their own screens in front of them. In the end that decision served us well. It was clear we opted in for giving this workshop remotely and we don't regret it. It was a blast! So honored and happy that the twenty people joining us stayed with us the whole time for a 2.5 hours online workshop. Really happy about the feedback received and looking forward to improving the session further. For the limited time we had we couldn't go as "extreme" as we would have liked to, yet the way we designed the workshop we could easily scale it up to a longer session and adapt it to different audiences.

The other workshops where both Simon and I were involved in were the "Daily Ensemble Sessions" with our wonderful conspirators Elizabeth Zagroba and Joep Schuurkes who initiated the whole idea. Each day we offered a different session with different facilitators, introducing ensembling in a different way, offering a different topic to work on, and having different participants working together. This was a great experiment and a great experience with a lot to learn from! We would have loved to offer this on-site on a bit bigger scale, yet making the scope smaller for online worked really well to test out the concept. Once again it was clear that the ensemble approach combined with a safe learning space can enable a group of strangers working together successfully and learning a lot on the way. Also, it's teaching valuable lessons how to communicate and collaborate better with people in general. I hosted the third of these sessions together with Joep Schuurkes and I learned a lot about facilitating again, what helps setting the stage for an easier start and what helps making the space safer for everyone. 

On a personal note: it might not have been the smartest idea to facilitate two workshops on the last day of the conference, knowing I will have my energy depleted after the first one. Still, I'm really happy we made this happen. I learned a lot, it was great working together with my fellow facilitators, and it was a pleasure having our lovely participants.

Next Up

Well - that's it for my conference year 2020! Next year? Originally, I had planned a lot of things already including conferences I've already agreed to. However, no one can tell how the world situation might look like then, so let's wait and see.
Regarding Agile Testing Days 2021, I do hope that some of the planned conferences can take place in any kind of form. Agile Testing Days USA, the newly announced AgileTD Open Air, and of course the usual Agile Testing Days again end of the year. Let's see what comes, I'm eager to feel this wonderful community spirit again. Until then, I could recharge my batteries to full once again this year. Thank you everyone.

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Sunday, February 16, 2020

DDD Europe 2020 - About Close Collaboration, Shared Language and Visual Models

Last week it was my first time at DDD Europe, and it was great. Although it was a pity to miss the fifth and final edition of European Testing Conference which took place at the exact same dates and even the same city, I was still very happy about this opportunity to explore a new community and gain a foundation in domain-driven design. I heard lots of great things about DDD Europe from different people, one of them being my colleague Thomas Ploch, who also got accepted as speaker this year.

In the beginning I didn't know what to expect of this conference and the DDD community that was new to me. I've seen the program with lots of big names, I've seen the sessions offered on topics I've merely heard about, and I wasn't sure whether my sessions on the mob approach would be a fit for this new audience. Quite intimidating, and yet also very exciting - a great learning opportunity.

Brace yourself - it was a long conference week, this is going to be a long post. It was worth it for me, though!

Arriving in Amsterdam

Sunday evening before the conference I've arrived at the hotel where most of speakers and attendees alike had been accommodated. I had some time to prepare myself for the week and practice my upcoming talk.

No one else from the conference was to be seen yet - or at least I couldn't make them out, as once more I entered a new community here. My colleague Thomas arrived the same evening as well so we had a good time over dinner and then made it to bed early. We knew it was going to be a long week; and it was indeed. A week where I learned once more about the importance of close collaboration with all parties, of evolving a shared language with everyone, of visualizing mental models to help us think, of experimentation and continuous learning. Lots of familiar topics, looked at from a different angle that was new to me.

Training Days

Both Thomas and I decided to participate in Nick Tune's and Kacper Gunia's two day training "Strategic DDD using bounded context canvas". I knew Nick from SwanseaCon and I hoped this workshop would provide me a quick hands-on introduction to all things DDD. I was not disappointed. We discovered our example domain using the business model canvas, did event storming and rule storming. We learned about bounded contexts, message flows, strategic classifications, and more. We used Nick's bounded context canvas, discussed ubiquitous language and policies, model traits, context interfaces, and sociotechnical architecture. We discovered lots of valuable heuristics along our way, too!

By joining this workshop I gained lots of new insights and pieces of knowledge which triggered lots of new thoughts. What a great entry into all things DDD, learning about concepts while applying them. I loved that we did lots of hands-on interactive exercises and mixed formats that we can take home to improve collaboration and architecture. I felt this training helped me right away to have better conversations about architectural topics. The long term impact? It made me curious to learn more, especially to see how we can bring people from different areas of expertise together and discuss a holistic view on everything.
The first day ended with very nice dinner conversations with Thomas Ploch, Maxime Sanglan-Charlier, Jennifer Carlston, and Thomas Bøgh Fangel. What a great group! The second day? Well, it also ended with a nice dinner - one of my favorite parts of every conference. This time I had the pleasure to get to know Zsofia Herendi, Roman Sachse and Marcello Duarte. What a nice crowd already, thank you all for the warm welcome into the DDD community!

DDD Foundations and Speakers Dinner

The main conference was preceded by a day of two smaller conferences taking place at the same time: DDD Foundations (curated by Nick Tune) and EventSourcing. People signed up for one conference could join sessions of the other one as well. In the end, however, I decided to stay with the foundations conference as one of my goals was to gain a fundamental understanding of DDD - so this sounded like the perfect opportunity. Check out my sketchnotes for the talks to learn more yourself.
A word of warning regarding my sketchnote for Alberto Brandolini's keynote: it really does not do it justice. This keynote was amazing and I could only put down a fraction of all the ideas shared. I so much related to this keynote, Alberto shared lots of wisdom on all things collaboration, experimentation and learning together. I'm very much looking forward to watching the recording when it's published, and I can only recommend it to you as well.

In the evening the speakers dinner took place. Once more I got to know more people, once again had fantastic food and even better conversations. Thank you all so much!

DDD Main Conference and Further Networking

The main conference days arrived, and with them also my own sessions. First of all, here are the sessions I joined including my sketchnotes of them.
It was a real pleasure finally listening to Kent Beck and seeing him perform on stage. What mastery. He derived the keynote content from conversations he had with conference participants. He drew his slides live in front of us. He lectured us in a unique entertaining way while still conveying important messages. What really resonated with me was to "insist on feedback before we make another decision based on risky assumptions", and that "waterfall is back, it stopped apologizing and it needs to be killed with fire."

During these main conference days, it was also up to me to perform. When first seeing the venue I couldn't resist and peek into the hall where I was supposed to speak - and I was in awe. My respect raised immediately. This theater hall accommodates up to 800 people! In the end it wasn't filled with 800, but still it was the largest stage I've ever put my foot on so far; and also the largest audience besides TestBash Brighton.

So here I gave my talk "A Story of Mob Programming, Testing and Everything". It happened to be in the last slot of the first day, with only lightening talks taking place at the same time. Therefore people thought it would be a keynote! It wasn't scheduled as such though, and yet people told me it didn't matter to them as they still think it was a keynote. I decided to stop correcting them and taking this as a compliment! :) I'm really happy it got recorded, too.

When hearing great feedback about my talk I was very relieved. It seems the topic resonated very well with the DDD community. One of my highlights here was that also Kent Beck listened to my talk, and afterwards I finally could speak with him for the first time. Now, there's a story to it. In the beginning of 2017, when my public speaking challenge started, Kent suddenly followed me back on Twitter (I assumed Lisa Crispin retweeting my stuff made this happen, so thanks to Lisa!). I couldn't believe it, so I wrote Kent a direct message telling him how honored I felt - and he said he liked my blog posts. This resulted in a written conversation over the next weeks that left quite an impact on me, encouraging me to go further on my journey. That was it back then, we never met. Now was the first time I had the chance to speak with him in person, so I grabbed it and contacted him again. And then, right after my talk, it happened. He found me and said he had been listening to me. He asked whether I would like to get feedback (absolutely!) and he shared very valuable thoughts with me how I could further level up as a speaker. Seeing him keynote the next day and having a longer conversation with him afterwards was truly inspiring! Lots of food for thought for me.
Following up on my talk closing the first day, I had a hands-on lab session on the second day on the topic of "Mob Exploratory Testing". I had given this workshop a few times already, and always revised the concept to improve it further. Just like this time, and it worked out very well. The audience was great! All of them wanted to be part of a mob, so we split into several mobs, mostly small ones around laptop screens, and two larger mobs working on bigger screens. Huge shout-out to Tobias Göschel who volunteered facilitating one of the big mobs! Great help and he said he learned a lot in this role, too. Overall, the two hours went very fast, people had fun and learned lots of things in short time. That's exactly what I like to set up the environment for! Mission accomplished.

The main conference was great, and there were even a few people I already knew. I had the pleasure to meet Kostas Stroggylos again who I knew from Agile Greece Summit, Gojko Adzic whom I met at several conferences already, and Romeu Moura whom I first met at European Testing Conference.

The conference evenings were great as well. On day one we had a huge dinner group where I finally met Tobias Göschel for the first time, on day two some of us joined lots of European Testing Conference speakers for dinner, bringing two great communities together and enjoying lots of insightful conversations. So good to meet many wonderful people from the testing community there! Among them my power learning group mate João Proença - although time was short I thoroughly enjoyed speaking with him in person again.

Sightseeing and a Long Way Home

Saturday arrived, the day I planned for sightseeing; so that's what I did. In case you'd like to see these parts of my conference speaking journey as well, feel free to follow me on Instagram. In the evening I joined Romeu Moura and met Felienne Hermans for the first time - what a pleasure! We had a great time together.

That should be it. I was supposed to leave Amsterdam the day after, yet life had different plans. Due to the heavy storm going across Europe, I got stranded. Instead of returning home and resting the next day, I had to wait at the hotel, the Amsterdam airport, Frankfurt, again a hotel, the Frankfurt airport, until I finally arrived home on Tuesday noon. Nothing but tired.

Still, I was happy about my time at DDD Europe and getting to know many great people. Thanks to everyone for welcoming me and sharing experiences with each other. The conference was very inclusive, and made an active effort to be so by offering gender-inclusive toilets, food for everyone, making the Pacman rule really work, and more. I loved the variety of super interesting topics. So many great speakers, no matter whether they were renowned already or not. All that combined with a very smooth organization - everything worked perfectly. Thanks so much to the fantastic organizers, you did an amazing job here and treated people very well. Looking forward to another DDD Europe!
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