Belgium testing days 2012

Last week I spoke at Belgium testing days in Brussels. It was my first international conference presentation and I had a blast even though I was really nervous about it during the conference since I had my presentation in the end. I also know that there was quite a competition about the audience for that slot  When I had entered the stage and started to share my experiences it all just ran off me, I felt confident about my experiences and to talk about things that I am passionate about is something I really like.

My talk was mainly about a project that I was in last year, as a part of a QA team in a big waterfall project with the goals of integrating new 3rd party software on global and local levels into a highly complex legacy system landscape. I spoke about the testing phase in the project which I was a part of in a chronological order, highlighting three different points in time where I and the QA team had to take bigger steps outside of test process boundaries to actually deliver value to the project as whole.

After my talk I got some questions that made me happy. At least I think I delivered some thoughts on the more context-driven approach to the challenges in my project that were not completely in line with what everyone in the audience would do. But still there were ways to relate to my project and see the little things that actually matter, at least I hope so. A special little thank you goes to Dawn Haynes, who throughout the conference mentored me in clarifying parts of my presentation to myself =).

About the rest of the conference, I enjoyed a lot of CONFERing. Talking to both international speakers and local Belgium testers that are passionate about what they do was a pleasure. People that I have only been talking to on twitter, email and blogs become much more real when meeting in person.

I really liked the keynotes that were delivered by great speakers, I was even featured in Karen N Johnsons talk about work titles.

Of the few sessions I attended I liked the workshop on “Solving practical problems with the quality assurance in the large scale” where is was really much about large scale agile. It was run by Eveliina Vuolli and Kirsi Korhonen who first told us about their organization and how they are working. After that it was time for the audience to bring their problems with “qa in the large scale agile” to the workshop and discuss in groups.

I brought up a thing that I have been thinking about a lot. I have not really been in the situation, but I would be very much interested in how I should actually handle it if I get there.

You have 15 agile teams working on a product, either different features of it or at different levels in technology. Suppose they deliver according to agile principles and have working software in iterations etc. When working with testing, you always find different types of information. And since we are talking about agile teams, I am assuming they perform their shares of testing activities. How should you handle the flow of information found in your teams and how should you act on it to make it a valuable resource? If anyone has suggestions for reading regarding this, please tell me.

Overall I had a very pleasant conference experience with many new thoughts and interesting discussions.