Open Space Sellout

It has become a fixture for many testers in the greater Hamburg area: the annual QS barcamp, which took place for the third time. Participants decided to cap visitors at 80 at a session last year without anybody really believing it was necessary. And necessary it was! A week before the event we had to close registration, which I think is awesome as it shows that people like the special atmosphere. Of course we had a few people not showing up, but there were about 70 people, which is a great number for an open space like this.

As always we had an opening keynote followed by a barbecue. The chairman of the GTB, Armin Metzger, gave his vision of testing in the future, which was a neat summary of things you will have heard, but maybe put together in a different way. It followed suit to the opening keynotes from the previous editions and set a positive mood for the barbecue and the emerging discussions about testing there. Funnily enough I talked for some time with my successor at my previous company, which was really nice. And yes, I changed jobs since my last blogpost and am a trainer and consultant for testing at oose now, who are coincidentally co-organizer of the barcamp together with the STUGHH. Anyway, back to the barcamp and the open space on Saturday. There were again a lot of different sessions:


My personal theme of the day was knowledge sharing and education, ranging from sessions on how to teach exploratory testing to developers to ones on BBST. Being a BBST instructor (at least on paper) I was happy to see that there was quite a lot of interest in that. The great thing about open spaces is that themes can be very different for different people. Ursula blogged about hers being the future while for others it was the role and tasks of testmangement in an agile world without testmanagers. 
What everyone seems to agree on is the great atmosphere and eagerness of the participants to learn and share knowledge. QS barcamp is not the only open space on testing out there, but to me it is definitely the best one and that’s why I am already looking forward to next year’s edition, which will as always take place on the first weekend of September, this time not at oose, but at MaibornWolff with a great view on the port of Hamburg.