Finishing my European Testing Conference talk.

Great talks have the power to motivate people, they motivate me.

These days I'm busy getting ready my talk for the European Testing Conference. One of the slides that is getting me into trouble is the one about where did I get the inspiration for the story.

Do I put the slide before or after the 'Thank you!' slide that closes the talk...
if I put it after, nobody reads it.
if I put it before, I need to drive away from my story to get here and I don't really like how it flows.

So by now, I'll post it here.

My talk is about how I managed to test a high peak in our business, for this I can point to certain works that helped me a lot figuring out what path to follow.

Rob Lambert, and his Nordic Testing Days 2015 talk "Why remaining Relevant is so Important" is one I went back a couple of times. If you believe that being brave is a good asset for a tester, I invite you to check this talk.

Antony Marcano wrote a blog post about Special Forces and Agile Teams. I liked the analogy, and it helped me understand that if I was going to be a team lead, or a retrospective facilitator, or I was going to record a video or setup a rapberry pi to show production performance data in real time, it was because at that very moment, it was the best service I could provide the team.

James Bach presented some time ago his Low Tech Testing Dashboard. This is something I used to be able to clearly communicate the state of the testing we were doing, what was the plan and the progress we were making.
James also has a good text about Test Jumpers, but my case didn't exactly reflect in his story, maybe because I'm not an external contractor, just a tester in my team, but I took some parts of his concept.

The idea of the map, as a analysis document has been discussed in Joep Schuurkes talk: Helping the New Tester to Get a Running Start.

All talks and posts converge on the idea of how diverse the actions of a skilled tester can be, on how to quickly understand what is happening and take decisions.

This work, the notes I took while we were in the project, and a stop at a nice café everyday on my way to the office, is how I managed to build up this talk.



See you in Helsinki.