SWET3 thoughts through mind maps

SWET3 attendees were: Johan Jonasson, Ola Hyltén, Anders Claesson, Oscar Cosmo, Petter Mattsson, Rikard Edgren, Henrik Andersson, Robert Bergqvist, Maria Kedemo, Sigge Birgisson, Simon Morley

A nice write-up by Rikard Edgren with picture of attendees and the abstracts can be found here.

This last weekend I attended SWET3 (Swedish Workshop on Exploratory Testing), which is a peer conference with a clear focus on aspects within context driven testing more than just exploratory testing in itself. This is my second time SWETing as I was also at SWET2, and I really enjoy the format as it is personal environment with a bunch of really experienced people. This also gives higher dimensions on the discussions about testing than you normally have for example in customer assignments.

The theme of the weekend was “Teaching testing”, with all the different angles that can give. My own topic that I submitted as an abstract was about my lectures for university and higher vocational students. The embryo for the session is in the form of this mind map. Note that I did not present or discuss this.

My abstracted topic

As I am working on getting more used to working with mind maps, I wanted to share the session discussions from the conference as mind maps as well. Since SWET2 I have actually spoken to quite a few people on using mind maps for test progress communication as shown by Christin Wiedemann when she demonstrates xBTM.

The first session at SWET3 was Rikard Edgren that actually has a similar context, but where he is actually teaching a whole course on the higher vocational education in Karlstad together with Henrik Emilsson. With a high degree of practice and interaction with open source software for teaching purposes I am after the session actually quite sure the testers that come out of that program become very good at testing.

Testing is never better than the communication of the results of it

Rikard Edgren

Second session was Johan Jonasson about the BBST courses and how the situation of teaching online works. However hard it is to teach and learn online, I actually think after the session that a bigger challenge is the cultural differences between the attendees and instructors. Here are my notes.

…while the video material could be hard and daunting to take in, the actual take-aways are the interactions and experience based assignments.

Johan Jonasson

Before dinner it was time for lightning talks. I spoke about my current work in “Building an organization wide heuristics based quality model”. Notice that the name is in working, and I am writing a blog post on that work as we speak. Anyway, I will share my talk as mind map as well.

My lightning talk - Organization wide heuristics based quality model

The third session was Simon Morley speaking on mindset changes. There was a lot of speaking about gut feelings, and the need for a better word for it to be sustainable in a professional and academic environment. I found this when searching for it, but no better wording. Michael Bolton suggested “HEURISTICS” and sighed on twitter, while Zeger van Hese suggested ØRISTICS as the scandinavian version of it. =) Although I am not sure that was the context of gut feelings we were discussing.

If projects lead are involved in root cause analysis, it usually ends up in updating process model documents

Simon Morley

Thank you all for a good weekend of testing thinking and discussions.

Tags: #softwaretesting #testing #swet #swet3 #exploratory testing