Last week the Noordertest conference took place in Groningen. With three groups of five parallel presentations and one keynote, each of the 160 attendees could find something interesting.
Polteq provided two presentations for the conference. I presented about Test Improvement for Agile together with Edze Knol and Ruud Teunissen presented about how to properly do test automation. Edze and I were in the first group of presentations, so after a general introduction to the conference we had to kick-off.
Test Improvement for Agile proved to be a hit, since we had more people than we had seats š We started with a short introduction to Agile and SCRUM, followed by a short introduction on test improvement. After the introduction we provided some more depth information on three of our key areas:
- Teamwork
- Test management
- Defect management
In teamwork we seek for collaboration, trust and the willingness to work outside your comfort zone. About test management you can read more in my previous post and defect management should be to support the team in stead of the business.
After our presentation I attended “The fragility of agility” by Lloyd Roden. It was nice to see that he pointed out the same groups of improvable items that we dealt with in our presentation.
Parallel was the presentation about proper test automation by Ruud Teunissen. He told the audience that we need to make sure that test automation bridges the gap between testware and the system under test. MakeĀ decisionsĀ on what you want to achieve and not on e.g. the tools that are already present in an organization. Remember that test automation is a form of development and should be treated as such.
Next was a workshop on how to ask questions. Main points were to make sure that you ask the question you really want to ask and then listen to the answer. Don’t add your own information while asking questions, so you will get the real answer in stead of what you want to hear.
Finally the keynote – also by Lloyd Roden – about challenges in software testing. Here Lloyd presented eight challenges in the software testing world. Learning, skills and communication where of course part of the challenges.
I really enjoyed the conference!
Testing Experiences 