Learning So Much..
Did you ever think of a TV news program as a bug reporting tool? I didn’t. The folks that developed healthcare.gov did. They thought that if something will go wrong with the live system they would find out from the news report. Eventually that happened, after Ben Simo put on the tester hat. After failing to find out if he is eligible to buy a health insurance for his granddaughter, he started using the application with the developer tools. This way he revealed a great series of functionality and usability bugs, as well as security vulnerabilities. All in all, Ben Simo’s keynote was an inspiring lesson that valuable testing can be done without requirements documents or support from the development team. Nonetheless, it was a good example of a context in which careful communication and ethical behavior are essential.
So the second conference day kickoff was exhilarating!
Its course was no less.
I enjoyed the instructional games that Graham Thomas prepared for us. Working in teams to describe concepts was a good return to the basics of testing, to the extent of discovering new insights about how we communicate what we do. I plan to propose the games for a Friday lunch within our company and have them as well during a meetup in our local testing community. The discussions they will trigger, oh boy!
Speaking of the community back home: after today’s panel discussion I can report that we will be able to organize a meetup that we had planned a long time ago about switching career path to testing from non-IT areas. It is more clear to me what to look at when preparing a session in this format after observing Huib Schoots facilitating a great discussion about diversity in testing.
Thursday Preview
Besides a handful of provocative presentations, the agenda for tomorrow includes some community sessions. One is for the SpeakEasy, a mentoring voluntary programme designed to increase diversity in tech conferences. For the second year running EuroSTAR has allocated a session on the agenda and the winner of this year’s selection process is Mirjana Kolarov, with a presentation about measuring performance.
Another session is the community choice presentation. A few months ago a homonym contest was launched on Huddle in which members were asked to nominate a favourite speaker. Patrick Duisters won it and thus he will share his learning experience; it’s about his team of biologists, researchers, hardware and software engineers that led to a user-friendly innovative medical system.
The voice of the community can also be heard for the popular do-over session. The best talk, as selected by attendees, will be repeated tomorrow. In Scores & Feedback section of the EuroSTAR 2016 app you can select your favourite session, the one that you think everyone else should attend or one that you missed out and would like to be repeated. Are you curios which one will be selected? Me too. Find out more tomorrow.
