Testbash 2016 - Introduction

I’m currently writing this introduction on my way down to Brighton for what will be my third Testbash conference and I couldn’t be more excited. Testbash, for the un-initiated is a software testing conference that happens every year down in Brighton, UK. It’s by no means the largest conference on the testing circuit but it exudes an amount quality that easily matches the bigger conferences abroad. A single-track conference with a workshop day preceding the main event and a lot of other activities surrounding it such as an early morning run, pre-party, pre-pre-party, a lean coffee and a hangover-coffee - there’s more than enough to do over the course of the few days it’s on for.

There’s a fantastically strong lineup of speakers and workshop co-ordinators this year including: Lisa Crispin, Christina Ohanian, Richard Bradshaw, Martin Hynie, Nicola Sedgwick, Dan Billing, Emma Armstrong, Bill Matthews and a special guest star in the form of Michael Wansley, of ‘Thrift Shop’ fame.

However I think a lot of testers that go to these such events agree with me that it’s not always about the talks or the workshops, it’s the stuff that happens in the pub, in the meetings of people and friends between talks or at the lunch break. It’s the swapping of personal, honest and down-to-earth stories ‘from the trenches’. Not to say the talks and workshops aren’t worth it, they are the formal and structured presentations of information, stories, models, theories or whatever else people want to share to a room of 10/50/300/1500 people that we need to be able to easily regurgitate back to others. But there’s something special about the 1-2-1s that happen after conference hours that really fuels the passion and gets even the most quiet of tester out of their shell - for me anyway.

Then there’s the overall passive energy; you get ~300 dedicated and passionate people from a disciple like testing in one area, the energy levels are going to FLY through the roof. This comes from people wanting to try new ideas, techniques, tools or the general excitement of the aforementioned story swapping - creative people will always find a way to be excited by the smallest thing and it’s a brilliant fuel that you can’t help but become infected by.

Here’s to a great event and to learning, laughing and being goddamn awesome! 

Why I Want To Work For Google

I've just started reading a new book (first read in a long time) entitled: "Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead" by Laszlo Bock who 'leads Google's people function' i.e. attracts and keeps people in Google. I'm only part way in but it's already struck so many chords that ring true inside my head.

I don't want to spoil the book in any way, shape or form so please go read for yourself. 

With that out the way, as quite a few people in my life know, my dream is to work for Google. This started yeeeaaarrsss ago, when I first heard about the infamous office slide. "A SLIDE?!?! AT WORK?!?! ABSURD!" I couldn't have been long out of secondary school, I may have still been in there so my view of a company like Google was still under the same image I had for any other grown up work establishments: suits, ties and cubicles. You can understand why this blew my mind and changed my focus forever. It may just seem like just a slide but to me it's an idea of something that I now push more than anything and that is that work should be FUN! We work more than anything else in our lives so for a company to realise this and make this become a reality is absolutely brilliant.

This blog is a short one, I want people to ask questions to me or to themselves for the fool experience. The final point is a realisation I came to walking home from work today. I've heard time and time again from people that school, college and uni are the best years of your life. This is due to freedom, not TOO much pressure and responsibility with freedom being the biggest of the three. What I had realised was this: everyday in primary school, I walked to and from there with my rucksack happy as can be, learning. Secondary school came along, I walked to and from there with my messenger bag happy as can be, learning. College came along, I could now wear what I wanted. Everyday I would go to and from college on the bus in my shorts, t-shirt and messenger bag happy as can be, learning. Uni came along and it was the EXACT same scenario as  college and now working for The App Business in London, it's exactly the same again. It may sound silly, it may sound like repetition but it's repetition of the BEST years of my life which has followed me through to my career: I get to learn everyday with a like-minded group of people, excited about what I do, wearing what I need to make me comfortable in my environment and being happy.

To me, Google is the pinnacle of this and I feel it's where I need to be a few more years down the line

Testbash 2014 - The Conclusion

I write this post around two weeks after Testbash so unfortunately it is just a memory that has slightly faded but I'd like to think talking about it keeps that memory afresh :-).

So hopefully if you're reading this you've already read the previous parts that preceded this conclusion (if not, what are you playing at?! Get yourself back to the front of the line). You'll have hopefully grasped that I had a lot to talk about coming away from Testbash and it that it left such an amazing impression on me as a professional and as a person. As stated before it was the first time meeting my peers and the people I'd be interacting with in the testing world for a long while to come yet so every moment was going to be exciting as I'd have the possibility to learn and meet new people. Learning was definitely the main point in my eyes, I'm sure most people will agree with me on this, and there was an abundant source of knowledge/chances to learn everywhere you went, whether it be at the bar or sitting down for dinner.

Watching all the pros talk was such an amazing spectacle as you must appreciate these are the guys I want to emulate and be around so seeing them in action is inspiring stuff. I realise that I'm years off any high level of testing and so I also recognise everyone around me had a LOT more experience ahead of me.

The 99 second talk specifically has planted some seeds in my head as I now REALLY want to do a talk on something properly so I'm racking my brains on topics that could span 30 minutes, haha.

The experience was something that I feel has made want to become a better test so I can give back like these guys do on a regular basis, I'm thankful for the opportunity in the first place so I must thank my boss Dan Caseley and Roger Booth for enabling me to take part. Thank you to everyone else was kind enough to talk to me or help me out in anyway, I understand a newbie can be annoying sometimes so thanks for putting up with me :-P.

Cheers for reading everyone, big thank you to Rosie Sherry for organising it all and make it all run very smoothly

This is the fuzzy tester (Zachary Angelo Borrelli) signing out

Testbash 2014 - Part 3

The seats in the main theatre rose up to our right with some beautiful wheel-shaped light fixtures hanging overhead. The stage had the standard table with a drape over it that I'd seen at so many other conferences and three sets of Software Testing Club monsters to bring it together. We'd pre-decided that because Dan is so tall we should go somewhere near the top so he wouldn't block anyone's view so we chose...RIGHT at the top, I swear I almost got a nosebleed.

We took our seats and got note-taking equipment out ready for the first talk which was Scott Barber's "Managing Application Performance Throughout the LifeCycle" where he spoke about the ideal model of where to fit performance testing in within development and how to avoid dead. This was a very strong start and everyone was very engaged, if this was any indication, we were in for a very good day of talks! This assumption wasn't wrong as up next was Mark Tomlinson's talk on "Contextual Decision-making in Testing-Apathy or Indifference?". From the notes I took I decided to talk about the key points i.e. 1+1 = fish and that damned spinning cat! Ironically these things mean nothing out of context. He also spoke about looking out for known knowns, known unknowns and unknowns unknowns so you know to switch the context in which you're looking at something when you need to. Break next! A few of us ventured to the shop to stock up on supplies for the talks ahead, sugar is our friend.... Before I went back inside though I met and spoke with Andy Glover (the cartoon tester) and Tony Bruce which was pretty exciting. Andy recognised my name from Twitter which was a good start to the conversation, we went on to the default pleasantries and whereabouts we were employed. I did have a hidden agenda with Andy though as I wanted to quiz him about his book, cartoons and the testimonies on the front cover of said book (by the way, they're both by him). For those of you who don't know Andy creates small (very funny and accurate) cartoons based on testing moments, scenarios and practises. I suggest everyone goes and picks up an e-copy here.

I headed in for the third talk pepped up on the sweets I'd just procured in the break, the next speaker was Jez Nicholson on "How to make [Developer] friends and influence [business] people". His opening lines were "for starters I'm a developer, not a tester". This was a huge risk as he was immediately showered with boos and I swear I saw a small pitchfork/torch wielding mob form near the middle of the seated area... Anyway, he was saying that developers and testers should become best of friends because testing and developing at the same time is a good way to work. This included getting devs to test as they went along, he likened this to asking a teenager to clean their room, even though I'm 23 I still find this very relatable.

The next talk, by Joep Schuurkes (well done on the pronunciation of that on the day Simon), was called "Helping the new tester to get a running  head start". Quite the challenge in most lines of work, he spoke about the best way of getting a new tester up to speed with with their new environment/software/processes.

Now, I must admit after this talk I stopped taking notes so my memory of the rest of the talks is hazy at best. There are a few reasons behind this madness, I promise I wasn't bored! I felt that taking notes was taking my mind away from listening to the talks themselves and I knew that they were being filmed for later consumption. Much like taking a video at a music concert I felt it slightly took away from being there in the moment, cheesy as that sounds it's something I've always adhered to. If you would like a summary of all of the talks you can find them on Scott Barber's TestBash post here P.S. it's a lot better than mine ;-).

Lunchtime was a nice break, a lovely vegetarian meal was provided for everyone in a very Harry Potter-esqe hall with rows of long tables in a grand room. We quickly scoffed down our food and headed outside for fresh air and errands (Mothers' Day fell close so it was the perfect time for prezzie shopping!). I can only promise you, avid reader, that I did indeed listen to the talks that followed lunch and took the information in, I'm just really banking on these videos to bring the information back out of my head. At the beginning of the last break Simon came onto the stage to do his pre-break announcement and he drove home the final plea for more 99 second talkers. A 99 second talk, that's right you guessed it, is where someone does an ad-hoc talk that hasn't had the most planning for 99 seconds, on stage. The idea is awesome and after seeing what other people had done previously e.g. poems, short stories, rants, I thought "I could PROBABLY get away with something like this...". I quickly came up with the idea around hiring computer science graduates as testers as they come away from uni with a really good base to work off. I won't go into detail about this though as I'm sure a blog post might be on the way for it. I had a quick discussion with Dan and he gave me arguments for and against and my mind was set, I told Simon that I wanted in and that it would be called "Young people, get them whilst they're hot" I hedged my bets on getting a few laughs from this and it did work out that way in the end. Anyway after this we all sat back down again for the last three talks but needless to say I was pre-occupied with writing some sort of structure for my talk and the nerves were setting in too. I'd never done anything like this before so I was quite scared of failure but you can't get better without failure and all that.

Keith Klein finished his talk in record speed, knowing that he was the last slot before beer as he kept reminding everyone (probably himself too) and the 99 second talkers were summoned to the stage, this was it! The people before me were doing so well; Toby confidently strutted around the stage talk about how curiosity killed the cat; Rich was sharing his rock'n'roll testing theory and Dan Billing's poem was graceful and inspired. Then it was my turn, I got off to an okay start but could hear the "erms" coming out every other word, I dug deep and managed to gain some traction and got across my main points, ending on a joke I thought would either tank or work like a dream, the latter came true and the laughter washed over me like a wave relieving me of all worries and that was it! Finished! I was so chuffed I'd managed to get up there and the free t-shirt just damned well brought it home :).

I realise at this point that this post is going on a bit and I do apologise, so much amazing and thrilling stuff happened that I must tell you about :-D.

The end of the 99 second talks was the signal that the main even of Testbash was over but another pub trip was looming so everyone was keen to get over there and start nattering to one another about the day they had, the information they'd taken and whatever else us whacky testers love to talk about. I met up with Christina Ohanian at the pub after she tweeted about my 99 second talk and that it was an interesting topic. We spoke about we both got into testing and what universities offered in the way of testing and so on and so forth. I really do feel quite strongly about this topic and think that people should look into the graduate market for testers more often but I digress. It was nearing my train time now so I started to say my goodbyes, everyone wished me a safe journey and with one trip down to the seafront I was on my way to catch the train home.

Thank you for reading these blogs, as I said before I wanted to write up about the whole experience and not really focus on the talks for now so please allow for the omissions. I will be doing a "Part 4" but it will be a conclusion of what I learnt and what Testbash has done for me as a person/tester. If you want to jump off now you're more than welcome to, thank you for reading and if you're staying on for the last hoorah then lets do this!

End of part 3

Testbash 2014 - Part 2

Hello again! Not long since we last met, let me carry on my tale...

I admit folly on my part as I missed one vital part near the end of my last post which were the stickers! We were greeted by a table of speechless Testbash ninjas laid out for everyone to label themselves to ease greetings and starting conversations. These really did come in handy because if all else failed you could just shout someone's name and hope for the best :-D.

As the party got into full swing you could tell the atmosphere was becoming more relaxed, everyone had identified their clique's so they knew where to return to if mingling had failed (this was my plan anyway) and the brave were indeed mingling away. The first strike off my list was Toby, he wandered over and said "heard you were looking for me Zac", I looked at his name badge and knew it was that familiar tram I'd seen plastered all over my Twitter feed. We exchanged pleasantries, asking all the relevant questions e.g. "How drunk are you?" and "Kebab later??!?!"...alas I fear I'm telling a slight fib. Next was on to Rob Lambert, followed by Dan Billing, Rosie and then last but not least (for that night at least) Simon Knight. All of them as nice as the last to meet, every one of them presented the same warm and welcoming smile that I could only have wished for from people who only knew me through a small profile and 140 characters here and there.

Throughout the night a lot of drinks were had, some awesome topics were brought up and I met a few more massive names that I'd seem from blogs and speakers from other conferences such as Tony Bruce, Stephen Blower, Mark Tomlinson and Huib Schoots. The testing conversations ranged from waterfall to agile, performance to UI, unfortunately my memory is hazy from the specifics as annoying as that is! A good time was had so my brain didn't focus on the technical side of the discussions, oopsie. Later on into the evening I met Carly Dyson who was talking to Rob Lambert and this continued on through the night, unfortunately Carly would be seemingly stuck with me and my colleagues for the rest of Testbash...sorry Carly! We'd been speaking on Twitter that day so it was nice to speak face-to-face. With Carly being a performance tester/engineer I definitely remember talking quite a lot about this area. The evening started to wind down and we were seated now, as the rock'n'roll testers we were (Rich you know what I mean ;-) ), most of us decided it was food time because of either general hunger or alcohol-induced hunger, whichever one I was all I remember is that I was grateful Subway was still open. After we'd all slowly devoured our pre-hangover food we all went back to our respective accommodations with some of the group crazily planning to meet up at 7:20am the next morning for breakfast (nutters the lot of them).

Morning of Testbash and I'm relieved not to (seemingly) have a hangover from the night before and was ready and raring to go learn, learn, learn! I made it to Brighton Dome just in time for the lean coffee session that was going on on the upper floor of the main entrance room. I knew the name of this coffee session but I hadn't a clue what the "lean" part of it was. After grabbing a cup of tea (yeah, I know, rebel) and saying hello to the few faces I'd recognised from the night before I sat down with a few other folks and was presented with the rules for the session. We were each to write a few topics on post-it notes, place them in the middle of the table and then vote on which ones we'd like to talk about. We had three sections: To do, doing and done. The kanban approach to tracking the discussion was really fun and gave the talk a very agile and easy-to-follow layout. We had eight minutes to talk about the topic with the most votes and after this we voted yay, nay or maybe with our thumbs in the Roman fashion. If the topic received a yay it would carry on for four minutes and a nay then we'd stop and move to the next one.

The first topic we spoke about was the one I put forward, albeit this was probably due to the vagueness of the statement "Is testing still relevant?" which practically boiled down to me asking whether automation vs human was better, that 's a talk for another time. The next talk was on metrics and whether they were used in an agile environment? Which was a really interesting topic to discuss as it's not something I've heard a lot of people talk about before. The thing I took away from the lean coffee though wasn't the topics themselves but the act of just discussing with fellow testers really helped me understand what I should be thinking about to become a better tester. It was also interesting as the last thing we got told to do was to do this exact thing i.e. "what would we take away from this" and as well as the statement above I felt that as a true testament to the way a tester thinks we took the original topic and progressed further into it, asking more and more questions that would eventually lead to more questions and answers as a tester would with a new feature/bug. After all of this was over we hung around for a bit before being let into the main hall for the main event to begin...

End of part 2

Testbash 2014 - Part 1

Hello one and all to my blog, I've revitalised my last one so it can hopefully be used for something more useful than it used to be and that will hopefully be testing :). This blog post is a recount my trip to Brighton for Testbash 2014

I'm a relatively new tester, I officially started full time as of last May and only graduated from uni in January 2014 so I'm still in the process of solidifying the basics I know and expanding out into the deeper regions of QA. I won't give you my whole life story from last year until now so I'll skip over the finer details. A few months back, Dan (everyone knows him as 'the tallest guy in the room'), my boss, proposed that we all go to Testbash which was some conference coming up in March. At first I didn't take notice and left him to it but the idea was set in his mind, he took it to one of the higher-ups in the company and approval was given. So that was settled, four of us were going to Testbash!

What the HELL is Testbash I ask myself? After some lengthy research I painted a rough picture of what it consisted of, watched some videos including a few previous year's 99 second talks and went about suitably preparing myself for the bash. I took to Twitter to see if I could find some testers that would be there and boy did I find some...I found A LOT. This suited me down to the ground as I practically live on Twitter so to find the testing community were such avid users was exciting! Before I knew it I'd invaded the lives of TobytheTester, Simon Knight, Richard Bradshaw, Dan Billing, Rosie Sherry and was stalking a few more that were yet to know of their curly haired lurker. 

Skip ahead a bit more and I'm booking my train tickets and hotel room, which I've given the title of best named accomodation ever "Motel Schmotel", and I'm getting quite nervous but excited at the same time. I think both of these things stem from me meeting my peers for the first time. I'd previously met Richard and Vernon at Notts test gathering earlier in the month but nothing on this scale.

So! The day came, I left the office after breaking the application I'd been tasked with testing (more on that later) and made my way to the train station. The time spent on the two trains to Brighton was spent trying desperately to keep up with the Testbash Twitter chatter that was going on between people already there and those who like me who making their way down. Dan and another colleague of mine, George were already down there after attending courses on previous days. The first train consisted of watching the backlog of The Simpsons episodes I'd accrued and the second train I fortuitously bumped into Rich (aka The Friendly Tester) and we nattered from London to Brighton about testing, the people we were going to meet and the drinking times of the thirsty masses on Twitter. I tweeted a list of the people who I'd like to meet during that evening and the next day based on the interactions I'd had on Twitter, I found this helpful in setting up my first round of introductions which eased the small amount of fright I had in mingling with my fellow testers. 

We arrived at Brighton train station and I walked to my accommodation, taking in the little bit of Brighton I could see. I quickly got settled and within minutes I was immediately ordered  beckoned out of my room by Dan and George so we could head off to the pre-Testbash party in a local bar. When we arrived it was abundtly clear I knew NO ONE else other than my work colleagues and this was slightly daunting until just after my first drink forage I was spoken to by Tony Wells, an employee of Centre4Testing (who did some of the Testbash sponsoring) and we immediately got talking about who we were and what we did. I started my sentence off with "I work for a small company in Derby called CommonTime, you've probably never heard of us" like some pompous hipster but meant in genuine way....promise. The bar slowly started to fill and within half an hour of our arrival the numbers had crept up significantly, this was Testbash in full swing!

End of part 1