A couple of weeks ago I participated in the first ever SWET, Swedish Workshop on Exploratory Testing, a so called peer conference. A real experience. 14 professionals of the swedish test scene and one american.
The setup of a peer conference is basically that as many participants as possible share a experience on the subject. The experience report is kept brief and then open session starts, where everyone can ask a question, share a reflection or just comment on the report.
Hearing the different reports it dawned on me just how difficult is seems to be implementing session based test management (sbtm), a kind of containter for exploratory test approach, in larger organisations. I personally haven’t experienced this since I’ve always been involved in organisations where change have been appreciated and more importantly the test organisation have been responsible for it’s own work. Free from requirements on how to do things or how to report progress or status you do not get into the situation of working in a way you know is wrong or even counter productive.
I was thrilled to learn more about debriefing in sbtm with the support of the acronym PROOF. I have totally missed that part of sbtm, probably due to the fact that I have never been in a situation where I’ve needed the support of that tool. Managing only yourself is not a task that really requires advanced techniques for reporting and session management. However I think Henrik Anderssson had a very interesting point in adding to letters to the acronym resulting in PROOF LA. The addition aiming to focus more on the tester than the tests hence counteracting the increasing omittance of debriefing sessions. I thought mostly about the habit in my projects to omit the retrospective sessions te longer the projects run. Can I find a way to inspire us to do more retrospectives and find better uses for them? More on this later I suspect..
Lastly James gave a rant on thread based test management. As always James’ stories are engaging and entertaining and the idea sounded good, even though not new. Mainly I think he has a point in bringing the subject to peoples attention as an actual technique that can be discussed and reflected upon. Naming something also makes it easier to share experiences around the subject.
Even though experience reports were interesting I found the relaxed discussions later in the evening, beer in hand, even more rewarding. It’s always good to talk to smart people with similar interests, and alcohol always loosens the lips a little. Among other subjects I gave a rant on the decline of TestZonen, the swedish site for test discussions.
All in all a very exiting event that gave me a lot of inspiration and new ideas.