TestBash Manchester

Back in the 1990s I was part of the PC demo scene. If you haven’t heard about that, well,  you missed out on something. It’s about people creating real time animation, often within file size limits of e.g. 64kb. At so called demo parties people come together to meet other like minded people and generally have a good time (and win a competition to have bragging rights, but lets just skip that part). So what does this demo scene thing a have to do with TestBash? Well, I was strongly reminded of that spirit. Many like minded people came together to talk testing and have a good time. So here is my little traveler report.
I took Thursday off in order to have relaxed journey. And it turned out that Thursday was made of 90 minute slots for me. 90 minutes to get to Hamburg airport, 90 minutes to get past bag drop and security check, 90 minutes to fly to Manchester, 90 minutes to get from the airport to the hotel (seriously, three big events the same night will bring traffic to its knees: ManU playing, Justin Bieber playing and the Pre TestBash MeetUp), where I already met the first people before checking in (hi to munich), with whom I shared a taxi to get to the meetup. Food drinks, a pool table and a nice bar made up for a great start. My personal highlight was Beren van Daele bringing the prototype of the test sphere card deck,  which people were really excited about. I was shortly involved in the project at an early stage and I have to admit that it has come a long way. Be sure to keep an eye on that project, I am glad that I got a deck.
Next day was the conference day and it kicked off with James Bach talking about social and emotional distance in testing. While I haven’t decided yet if I agree with social and emotional distance being antonyms on the same scale, it got me thinking and James is certainly one of the better public speakers.
Iain Bright talked on asking questions and brought up some points that you probably unknowingly know about, but haven’t probably thought about too much. Kim Knup was all a out positivity and that talk resonated well with me and in fact made me follow up with this. Duncan Nisbet had some thoughts on being Salmon a.k.a. testing in an agile environment and shifting testing left. That one pretty much summed up most of my thoughts concerning that topic, so it was great. Mark Winteringham went nuts on acceptance scenario, but still identified three deadly sins of using them, which you should really avoid. And by that I mean really avoid. Helena Jeret-Mäe and Joep Schuurkes introduced their programme to help new testers become better testers or rather become testers at all. And this about doing some practical hands on task testing, not reading some book. Huib Schoots talked on what it took for him to become awesome. Well, modesty isn’t on top of the list 😉 but him escaping a ISTQB world to become a RST teacher was quite a journey. Gwen Diagram cursed her way through setting up a proper environment and monitoring. I was told she was offered a job right after mentioning that she was unemployed during her talk. Isn’t that awesome? We listened to Stephen Mounsey’s talk on listening, which is an important part of gathering information. Beren van Daele closed the scheduled talks with his experience report of testing in a project that was not really about doing proper testing. After that came the 99 second talks. There were a lot of them, but the one that stood out for me was about your English not being your colleague’s English. Well, there’s something about that.
I won’t go into too much detail on the talks here, you will be able to view them on the dojo and they are all worth it.
TestBash was officially a one day conference, but there was an open space on Saturday, where people came up with topics on their own, ranging from video gaming as skill training over security testing with OWASP ZAP to grooming one’s beard so that it won’t be a fire hazard. I made security testing the main theme for my day, joining Dan Billing in his workshop on the Ticket Magpie project for improving one’s security skills called, which is more or less a playground. Simon Bennet afterwards had a series of sessions on OWASP and ZAP, which I attended since it is a topic I am very interested in at the moment and have been fiddling around with zap before. The day closed with the video game session on the lighter side. Afterwards small groups went downtown to have dinner at a food court. I joined some others for great Indian food before going back to the pub next to the hotel where we talked some more testing and some not so much testing.
On my way home I did some different kind of security testing as security found a monkey wrench in my bag that I had been carrying around for some time it seems. If you think in terms of passed/not passed checks, manchester passed, while hamburg didn’t.
My key take away from TestBash, besides many ideas, is the spirit for testing people shared, which was really awesome. It’s pretty safe to assume that this wasn’t my last TestBash. So, thank you to Rosie Sherry and Richard Bradshaw for doing a great job and to Vernon Richards for being a great host.