How to use TestSphere for Lean Lunch

10/12/2017 by Christian Kram | Filed in agile, testing | Comments Off on How to use TestSphere for Lean Lunch

If you came to know how TestSphere can help you lose weight, sorry, but I haven’t figured that out yet. This short blog post is about how we used TestSphere to facilitate a Lean Lunch session for the MACH testing community of practice.

So what is Lean Lunch again? Well, it is an idea I got to know about after reading Maria Kedemo’s blogpost on just the very same topic. Lean Lunch is a variation of the Lean Coffee idea. You gather in your lunchbreak to talk about different topics in an organized way. And this is where the card deck comes into play as the usual topic finding procedure is replaced by drawing a card. So what we did was this:

  1. Get a room for lunch break
  2. Order or bring some food
  3. Draw a card and read it out
  4. Instead of eating silently, talk about the topic provided by the card and share your experiences with the topic
  5. After 5 minutes, draw another card
  6. Watch out that your food doesn’t get cold because of all the talking

We did this little exercise as we had a new colleague around and wanted to introduce her to the community of practice and get to know each other a little bit. Let’s face it, in most meetings you discuss very specific problems that are sometimes hard to understand for people who are new to the company. TestSphere helps you to abstract a bit and talk about different points of view, which is a lot easier for newcomers. In hindsight I would probably change one thing about the way we proceeded. Instead of changing the topic every 5 minutes, I would do a thumb voting to see if there is still desire to talk about that topic. While we scratched quite a few topics, I had the feeling that the clock was interrupting interesting discussions sometimes, so that might be something worth pursuing.