EuroStar the come down!
Eurostar was a few weeks ago now already but I am still thinking about the conversations I had and inspirational and educational talks I attended.
The main thing I am taking away from the experience is, that I am not alone in the difficulties I face and others have overcome them before, so I can too.
And maybe the way to is to create conversations and be helpful.
Hopefully more on that another time.
EuroStar this year was in Dublin, this made it possible for me to fly out on the day the conference started and back the day it ended.
I would suggest though to anyone that if you can be around for the socials. You can make connections and maybe even friends!
As much as the talks were great, and I had many lightbulb moments during the talks it is really about making connections and networking and having conversations.
Being an introvert I struggle with this sometimes but it feels great when you step out of your comfort zone and have a great chat with someone.
So many times did people say hi and knew me by my twitter handle and vice versa! It was so great to finally meet people from all over the world in the flesh.
Did you meet anyone you only know online?
My Highlights were:
QA Cookbook: Ingredients for a Great Recipe
Alexandra Schladebeck, BREDEX GmbH, Germany
This was a fun talk and I am unsure how to relate my notes. Why not talk about it on the forum?
Alex gave us 8 recipes in total.
These made me think about what works for us and what are the downside and upsides.
I could definitely relate with the themes of the talk. I liked the fact that thinking about testing practices as recipes, let’s you think about adding different spice and hence a different spin on a process to try something new.
I felt this was one of the main messages, follow a process/guideline and adapt it and then make sure you review if things improved or not. Even at the risk of personalities clashing, make sure to hold retrospectives about what you tried.
KEYNOTE 3: Restore to Factory Settings: What to Do When a Change Programme Goes Wrong
Isabel Evans, Dolphin Computer Access
The emphasis was that we all make mistakes and how we can be recovering from set backs.
One big new take away for me were the influence diagrams – why things have happened and why things may happen – These don’t describe cause and effect but can be really useful in determining where a process is going wrong.
Isabel’s tale was about improving testing at a company. But it became clear very quickly that the problems were routed a lot deeper and the whole picture needed to be addressed. Leadership does not mean lead in front – let people make mistakes and then help them and guide alongside their own pace.
KEYNOTE 5: Value: Why we have it backward
Shmuel Gershon, Intel, Israel
Do we understand what the real value of software is?
Civilisation runs on software. Dependent on software!
Everyone stores, transfers and applies knowledge in their life.
Civilisation itself depends on testers now. We look for the most faithful representation of knowledge possible in software.
Testers are therefore researchers of knowledge.
Software really is endangering civilisation as we know it – big responsibility of testers!
We need to care about users and what they are looking for.
We come to conferences to save civilisation and for the beer! (Or in my case the food).
The TestLab!
I also want to give a shout out to the TestLab team! They were fun, engaged individuals working as a team to provide puzzles and exercises and brought a whole new level of engagement to the event!
What do we do after the conference?
Now comes the difficult part! When you are home how do you implement any of the great thing you learned without just suffering the come down from the conference?
I started with just a question:
Are we giving our customers the right information for the task?
Did you ask a question? How are you applying your newly gained knowledge?
There were so many social events around the conference, I hope someone has details on all of them! Post them in the forum if you do! 🙂
Thanks again to the Test Huddle team for the opportunity to be part of this awesome event! It was a 4 year long dream come true! 😀
