It’s been a week since I have returned from Tallinn and the Nordic Testing Days conference, which has again been brilliantly organised and executed by Grete Napits and her wonderful team in Estonia. Helena Jeret-Mäe led the curation of this years content alongside her colleagues, and without doubt the organising team had certainly raised the bar again.

There were speakers from almost all corners of the testing globe, from Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, India and of course Estonia. A fantastic achievement! As a result of this breadth and depth of testing talent, it was hard to choose whose talks and workshops to go to, but choose I did.

Warming up

The hospitality and warmth of the conference, and Tallinn is evident. It began with an impromptu walk round the old town with Helena and a whole bunch of other great testers. The amazing architecture, the views from the city walls and the discussion made for a fantastic evening.

But first on to the tutorial days! Bill Matthews and I had already run “Exploring App (In)security” at Let’s Test the previous week, and without a doubt we had learned from that experience. So, we aimed this time to rebalance the session to make it much more interactive and practical at the outset. Many of the challenges of security testing come not only from understanding the threats to applications and therefore businesses, but also understanding how those threats can be translated into real world vulnerabilities, which attackers can then exploit.

Bringing forward those experiences in early, so the attendees were doing practical exercises from the beginning  was our primary goal for the day, so that they got the most out of Bill and I, the material we produced and the learning they could elicit from the discussion.

Again, we started out with an exploration of the application under test, but then we burst straight into a group threat modelling exercise!

After that, all the testers broke into small groups and pairs as we all found ways to exploit the threats we modelled, by exploring the vulnerabilities that might lurk under the covers.

It was a long and exhausting day. Bill and I were rarely off our feet. We had a great time working with all these fantastic testers. One or two have even got in touch since to ask follow up questions and look for further study. Very encouraging and inspiring! It’s also inspiring me to do a whole lot more in 2016!

On to the first day of the conference proper, and following an interesting keynote by Mart Noorma on the Estonian contributions on space exploration and technology, I had my first major decision to make.

Spinning up your own influence

Katrina Clokie’s workshop “Become someone who makes things happen” was one of the highlights of the conference for me. In this workshop we were challenged to make sense of what our problems are in terms of making an impact on our teams, and influencing the decision making process.

Communicating our beliefs, needs and thinking is a huge problem for testers. I often have issues on influence myself, as I have explained in this blog post: The MEWTation of Communication. So, Katrina’s workshop really resonated with me because of that. We usually worked in pairs or small groups, working through scenarios where our sales skills specifically would be challenged – selling our own ideas, thoughts, and needs in testing.

Katrina referred to SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication, Need) is a sales methodology that focusses on the needs of a customer, and attunes their offerings based on a mutually agreed solution. The problem here is not necessarily getting another person to recognise that the situation you have identified is a problem, that needs resolving, but also the impact to the person you are working with.

For testers there are always scenarios where this technique, and others like it, would be useful. Communicating your thoughts and feelings on acceptance criteria, resolving issues surrounding test planning and estimation, ensuring that you have effective resources and tools to do your job, bug advocacy – the list is endless.

Katrina encouraged us not only to explore the feedback we received, but also attitudes and feelings. Whether you are respectful and caring to those you work with, the difference between aggression and assertiveness, asking the right questions at the right time and using non verbal queues can all have an impact on your influence and ability to get things done.

This was a fantastic workshop that drew the best out of everyone in the room, both new to testing, experienced and hands on, and managers too!

Testing? Thats insanity!

Next up for me was Santosh Tuppad. His energy and enthusiasm for his craft was tested to the full, as Santosh lead us through a beautiful and colourful journey, as he became inspired to begin his own journey by starting Test Insane, his own exploratory test consultancy.

The great thing about conferences of any sort is that it can bring people together. Santosh and I have been in touch for many years now, but we have never met until we came to Nordic Testing Days. It’s like we have been friends for years, so a warm hug was in order, for this strong man had traversed continents to come and speak for an hour! However his love of testing and learning permeated the social side of this conference completely.

The impressive thing about this talk though was not just Santosh’s clear love of testing as a craft, but also his contribution to the wider community. Sure, Test Insane is a consultancy, but much of the material, tools, mind maps, and papers his team produce are shared across the board – for free! A valuable resource indeed, and Santosh and his team are a very valuable addition to the testing community.

First time speaker – but not the last

My Weekend Testing colleague Neil Studd made his speaking debut at Nordic Testing Days with “Weekend Testing Europe: A behind the scenes guide to facilitating effective learning”.

Neil came across with a confidence that belied both his nerves and trepidation at speaking for the first time. He not only talked about the drivers to establishing an exciting and dynamic learning community for testers online, which was the main thrust of his talk – but also some of the psychological thinking that was involved in that process.

Neil talked about the imposter syndrome – where people who are extremely skilled and competent in their chosen field, and yet still feel as if they are frauds, not deserving of acclaim, attention or feel their achievements are of any worth. I think that this is a phenomenon that a lot of people encounter – only the most arrogant of people wouldn’t question themselves occasionally.

However, I feel that this is something that Neil should have no issue with. He is a highly skilled and intuitive tester, with a great breadth and depth of knowledge, and he expresses it well.

Neil’s story is a shared story however, and with Amy Phillips, and their journey to bringing back to life the Europe chapter of Weekend Testing. My involvement in that is a footnote in this story, but I hope to be very much of its future.

Gaming the system

Next up was Kristoffer Nordström and his talk “Gamification – How to Engage Your End Users”. Kris is another tester that I have known about for a while, but had neither met not seen speak. Another great opportunity to learn from someone new.

Kris’ talk was a fascinating exploration of using gamification to encourage the teams he worked with to not only produce great work, but enjoy doing it. By using elements of game thinking and mechanics, developers and testers on his teams were able to contribute to the product by finding bugs and fixing code; and were encouraged to do so by earning points (and points mean prizes).

Here lies the problem that Kris elaborated on. How do you get people to want to work on code and bugs, but to not want to do just because they are going to earn prizes for their efforts. It’s a complex balance to strike. Renumerating them enough, with branded, high quality pencils, mugs and t-shirts; AND trying to make it fun and exciting for the dev teams.

Kris even gamed the talk, with attendees playing bingo, trying to pick out the key words from the talk. I think I would need to spend some more time with Kris to get more of a handle on this topic, as it is an interesting one. I’ve had to use similar techniques during my time as a trainee teacher and Scout leader to help children become more engaged with activities – collecting stars or badges for examples. Great stuff!

Valuable lessons

Like the rest of the conference, this keynote was another one full of firsts. Rob Sabourin is another tester who I have never met, but had heard many interesting things about. His talk ‘Value Sync’ was an exciting and dynamic discussion about what we value as testers, what people on projects and teams value, and what our stakeholders and customers value – and seeing the relationships between those values.

Rob’s main point was whether the conflicts in these values could be resolved, where one person values low cost over quality, or speed to market over market saturation. There are a lot of elements to balance in teams, organisations and businesses; and testers have a part to play here in expressing what they value, and ensuring that the needs of stakeholders are also met by their testing.

It was a great ending to a long hard day of learning, networking and testing! But it wasn’t over yet.

Lightning in a bottle

So, there was a big sheet of paper on a pillar in the conference lobby – Lightning talks 9pm! I was tired, but there was so much energy in the room. Bill Matthews had already pressed ganged me into speaking – 5 mins of talk + Q&A. So, I contributed the short talk I did at MEWT and compressed it down…trying to pull out the salient points – about how personal identity and problems surrounding being a ‘geek’ in the workplace affects communication and influence.

A whole bunch of great people got up to talk – Bill Matthews, Neil Studd, Guna Petrova, Pekka Marjamäki, Kristjan Uba, Erik Brickarp and Olari Koppel. Resoundingly my favourite talk of the night was Neil’s on ‘9-5 testers’. Here is his blog post on the topic: Whats wrong with 9 to 5 testers.

In the past I have been a 9 to 5 tester, getting to work, doing my work competently, going home. That’s ok! There is nothing wrong with that. I had other interests and needs – I was in a new relationship and/or recently married, or I was playing in my gaming clan. Later, in 2007 I found other interests and got in to Scouting in a big way, which takes up a huge amount of my time. It didn’t stop me wanting to be a better tester, I just didn’t go to many meetups or do much reading, and certainly no conferences. As I have encountered various family crisis recently, I have scaled back my Scouting to focus on those, but my engagement with the testing community has filled quite a lot of that void; and it has been very rewarding.

A lot of this has to do with a number of factors – and one of the major ones for me was working in an environment that allowed me to be the kind of tester I wanted to be. Some of the companies that I have worked with have been less than supportive about attending conferences, worrying about the cost and the value to the business (perfectly valid considerations, I might add). Sometimes, if they allowed it, they specified the kinds of meetings to go to, rather than the testers choice. I don’t think I went to my first meetup until around 2008/9, almost a decade into my career.

I raised a question – ‘isn’t this about bad testers?’ not whether you spend every waking hour testing? It’s a different question, and not one we focussed on. Bad testing is not the same as being someone who doesn’t want to do testing or talk about testing in their spare time.

Neil also talked about introverted behaviours and how they might be a blocker to getting people engaged. It’s a complex problem, and not one easily solved. Except that creating a safe space for learning, either physical or not, that allows anyone to learn at their own speed and their own time can only be a good thing.

Rob Remaining Relevant

Friday morning brought new experiences and new challenges, namely watching Rob Lambert’s opening keynote on the second day of the conference. “Why remaining relevant is so important” reflects on the fast pace of change needed in businesses and services, and our place within that change. Do we sit on our hands and do nothing to meet that challenge and let opportunities pass us by, or do we skill up and start adding lots of value to our teams and businesses.

Whilst it may seem to be basic to talk about how you can remain  employable, it talks a lot more to ensure you remain valuable to your team, and continue to be valuable throughout. It’s a challenge we face every day, not only as testers, but as members of a wider development organisation. And ALL of what Rob talks about in this talk is valuable to everyone, not just testers. One of the main points here I took home was adding skills. Add as many skills as you can, become good at them – it might be coding, or using a particular tool, or being knowledgeable about a particular testing approach, or domain knowledge in your organisation. These ALL add value!.

I’d like to reflect further on these points in due course, but it would take too long here to discuss. However I would say this. Rob’s book “Remaining relevant and employable” is a great read. I read it in one sitting by the pool in the Canary Islands, and was one of the main reasons I decided to take a permanent role at New Voice Media. I’ve told this to Rob myself, and I don’t mind telling you now.

Preaching to the unconverted

Lastly, before I wrap up, I wanted to say a word about Katrina Clokie’s talk, which was a last minute substitution to the programme. “Sharing Testing with Non-testers in Agile teams” was a fantastic case study on how Katrina went into a business with little or no testing, little or no agility and was expected to give them all that in a 90 minute training session.

Katrina’s experience here was an expression of a depth of knowledge and skill, but also patience, timing, communication, tact and learning. Something we all should pay heed to.

Fantastic Revelations, Amazing Revelations

I’m not going to write much about my own talk “The Testing of Fear” here. I can’t really reflect on this easily in public. Giving this talk was emotionally difficult for me. I had practiced the talk before, at meetups in the UK. All the talks went well.

Due to the unfortunate and untimely death of an early mentor in my career, Adrian Smith, I changed the initial few slides late the previous night. Adrian was important to me, not least because he helped me get my first step on the ladder. His encouragement, leadership, skill and fortitude was an example to all who met and worked with him.

I went to his funeral this afternoon, and I learned a lot about him. As a lad he learned to be a butcher in his home town. He was a Royal Marine Commando, and served his country on many occasions. After leaving the Marines, he served as a police officer, where he met his late wife Deena. After that, he began a largely self taught career in IT – project and people manager, developer, tester, architect, DBA – almost everything you could think of, he could do! We all respected him and loved him. His funeral service this afternoon reflected that, as many of his friends and colleagues joined his family to celebrate his life today.

He was an agent of change – no fear of that.

Farewell…but not goodbye

Nordic Testing Days 2015 was an intense three days of learning and development for me. I hope to be privileged enough to attend again next year, and for years to come. It is a dynamic and exciting conference, with a wide breadth and depth of excellent testers and experiences. I know it will go on being that way! I can’t wait for 2016!