The tale of TestBash Brighton 2018
I was finally able to attend TestBash Brighton, the mother of all TestBashes.
Getting there took me almost 10 hours, who would have guessed that all the trains to the airport would run on time? Getting home talk me even longer, who would have guessed that 2cm of snow would let European transportation break down? Anyway, according to twitter the workshops on thursday were quite nice. When I arrived late that evening, the meetup was already taking place. I only stayed for a bagel and a beer as my voice was almost gone and I wanted to be able to talk the next two days.
Conference day was starting with lean coffee, but I got tangled up in a discussion about cheese, butter and bread, so that I totally missed it, but you could already sense that special testbash vibe there.
The overall level of the talks that day was quite high in my opinion, so check them out on the Dojo if you can. For me there were three ones that were standing out contentwise:
Emily Webber gave a great talk about communities of practice, going from what they are, how they work to her own experiences with them. From what I was told the talk was a nice complement to the workshop she gave the day before. personally communities of practice are a big topic for me right now, not just in testing wise, but in general (you know, the scrum master half of my working life), and I got some nice tidbits that I didn’t really think about too much before. And it made me get her book, which on the one hand is for free on Kindle unlimited and on the other hand made me fall asleep after reading two pages that night, but it certainly wasn’t because of the content. Having read it on my flight home, I dare to say that it was definitely not because of the content.
Alan Page gave an awesome talk on the modern testing approach already promoted on the ab testing podcast. I really appreciated that it gave a condensed view of the topic. The three listeners will not have gotten that much new input, but on the podcasts the content is scattered among the episodes, so getting it as a single talk was great. And Alan is a great presenter, so that definitely added to the overall experience. Fan boy moment of the weekend: Alan letting me sign up for the podcasts slackchannel directly on his macbook and me shutting down the app, because mac’s have a different keyboard layout than windows. Oh, well…
Ash Winter gave a great talk on the implications of ci and cd on testing and on how to approach a building pipeline as well. This was certainly a nice overview of how testing evolves and gets more technical, without the dreadful “do I need to code?” Debate. In addition ash is – except from being an nice guy – a very good presenter and knows how to work the stage. And he showed the magic of scrolls!
On an emotional level I have to mentioned Danny Dainton‘s talk who in his first talk ever described his journey from being a football head in school to joining the army to get into testing to becoming an expert for postman. Nice one, Danny, you certainly deserved the post-talk relief!
The underlying topic that day for me really was how the focus of testing has shifted away from working in the system to working on the system as well. Testing isn’t something isolated anymore and therefore interdisciplinary aspects are becoming more and more prominent. But that topic will certainly warrant a post of its own.
The day capped off with the infamous 99 seconds, which covered a broad range of topics and was once again great to listen to.
During the breaks there was an experiment called unexpo. A format you might know as marketplace. attendees could put up exhibition posters in a room to whatever topic and attendees could walk around and participate or talk at any exhibtion they liked. I think that is a nice addition and should become a regular part. It would be even better if there were the same stands in every break, so that you could catch up with ones you might have missed in the first break for reasons like long queues in front of the tea (probably the most British of all problems) or something like that.
I skipped the meetup in the evening to save my voice from going away completed. As hard a decision it was from a social point of view, it proved to be the right one in hindsight.
Saturday was open space time. A format that I particularly like and that we promote at the QS Barcamp in hamburg as well (come around, bring your friends and family!). The amount of talks was a bit lower than usual, but there were some really nice sessions. There were two sessions that stood out for me. The first one was a discussion for the let’s talk about tests podcast, which is a) awesome and b) approaching episode 100. So there is a chance that I might be on the anniversary episode, yay!
The next one was a nobrainer for me. Dan Billing with some support by Beren van Daele hosted a session on risk storming Knight Rider! Testsphere, a format that I was eager to try anyway and one of favourite childhood TV shows (the theme is still my ring tone)? Count me in! Aside from the retro fun, the session was a nice introduction to risk storming, a collaborative risk evaluation method using the test sphere deck.
In the evening some of the attendees not leaving on Saturday went off to a pub, have dinner and enjoy the snowflakes (to different degrees that is) which was a great finish to a great weekend. Overall it was a great event onces again, testbashes really succeed in providing great content and a great atmosphere. There were so many awesome people around that it would be wrong to singly any one person out, so thank you everyone for the great time and see you next year!
