Copenhagen Context Conference 2015, How we got there...

So, My friend Tomislav and I got to the Copenhagen Context Conference, and since the short story has already been told at my twitter account, I'm writing down the long one here.



How did we get there...

Well, because we are lucky.

We are lucky that we started out testing career working with a manager that would get us as many books about testing as we asked, and let us some time to read them at office hours,  that was the spark that started all this. We learned that there is a testing community, formed by testers, trying to get better in what they do, to become true craftsman in software testing.

I was lucky enough to have lunch sitting next to Derk-Jan de Grood, at the Bilbao Test&QA Conference last year. We talked about getting a proposal for a talk, and he told me that a good idea is to tell something that happened to you, to tell your own experience in your work.

Then, once the Copenhagen Context Conference call for papers was done, and the programme got released, there happened to be a chance for getting one free ticket for the conference. You just had to submit a video explaining why you would like to go there. (Well, the topic was about getting Context Driven Testing further, but you know what I mean)

I had to give it a try, I would tell a story, the story of how I became a Software Tester, but I would not record it at my living room, that's too lame, I would record it outside, with a green background, that's always nice. And I would not record it alone, I want somebody else in the frame, so I'll ask my friend Tomislav to join me, after all, we become software testers the same day.

Then the night before, I realized that it would be waaay more fun, if instead of asking a place for me, I would ask a place for him at the conference. And I didn't tell him anything, so the surprise in his eyes when I come out with the idea was a true surprise recorded by the camera.

This was fun, really fun, and that's how Tomislav got his way to this conference.

For my side, I went to EuroStar conference in Dublin, and met Morten Hougaard there. He asked me how could he get me to his conference, and we agreed that I would be the conference Blogger. We had both seen the awesome work that Neil Studd had produced for the conference blog and we used this as a example of what we could try to do. One post per week, be it long or short and I would pay my way to the conference.

Cool, but now you have to publish something, so I decided to ask for help, as the conference is going to be about the people getting to it, I asked for help, I recorded a petition with my phone, and using that as example, I sent it to the people I knew were coming to the conference. The feedback was just fantastic.

Pradeep Soundararajan:

James Bach:

 
Graham Freeburn:

Huib Schoots & Richard Bradshaw: Video

With this, and a little help from my friends, I managed to publish as we agreed, and that's how I got my way to the conference.

So, basically, we went all that way to Copenhagen because we were lucky.

But I'm telling you something... For the next years edition, there is going to be a free slot for a  Blogger, and it could be you.

Just stay tuned to the http://copenhagencontext.com/ site and give it a try, make your own way to the Copenhagen Context 2016 Conference.

Working in a Startup is like...

From time to time I read some post stating that working in a startup is like riding a rollercoaster, but you know what... from my point of view, this is not quite true.

For me, working in peerTransfer, our startup company, is like being a sailor of the SS Westfalen, a German merchant ship who sailed the seas a century ago.

Let me tell you her story.

Imagine how the world was like in 1933. Germany was having hard times because of the Treaty of Versailles, and during years, many Germans went to live to foreign countries, many of them to South America.

In those days, postal service was the only possible communication, so if a letter had to be sent from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro, it had to make its way by ship, and it could be a matter of months before it arrived to his destination.

The German Postal Service came with an idea... What if we deliver the mail using seaplanes, like the Dornier Do J "Wal" (Whale). But the main problem was the range this plane had was not enough to make it from the western coast of Africa to the eastern coast of South America.

So they came with another idea, why don't we sail a ship to the middle of the Atlantic ocean, with a radio beam to guide the plane to the ship, a crane to lift the plane, refuel it, sail it through the night and then use a catapult to launch the plane to the sky with the first light of dawn, so it could fly a second stage of his journey and get to the Brazilian coast.

Here comes SS Westfalen into our story. She was built as a freighter in 1906, spent World War I anchored in Valparaiso (Chile), went back to service after the war, and since she was quite outdated, sold to Lufthansa in 1933. She went to workshops in Bremen to get the crane and the rest of the equipment she would need to perform her duty, and went to the Atlantic Ocean.

Here is a nice drawing from Popular Mechanics explaining the route:

This service worked from February 1934 until April 1935, performing more than 300 services, with just one single accident due to adverse weather conditions. They were able to deliver mail service in 4 days instead of months. At the end, as the range of the seaplanes increased, the ships were no longer needed, but they managed to prove that it could be done.

Iker Marcaide discovered when he went to study to the MIT that his payment had been lost, because the banks were using a slow and unreliable process to send his money from Valencia to Boston. He got an idea, he founded a startup company to solve this problem, to process international tuition payments in a fast and convenient way.

The developers team is like the engine room crew that is making this good old ship sail, every time we deploy to production, we are maintaining, fixing or updating the ships engine, crane, catapult, radio or kitchen, whatever we need to make her perform its duty.

Every payment we process is a letter from somebody who matters to somebody else who cares about, every payment batch we deliver to our schools is a seaplane we managed to guide to the ship in the middle of the ocean, lift it, refuel the plane, provide a hot dinner and a dry bed to the pilot & navigator and at dawn, launch them so they get to their destination.

Of course we are not the only ones running the company. We have a amazing operations team, who are the pilots, flying a open cabin seaplane full of mailbags, with the help of compass, clock and map, they manage to get to their destination every single time, solving whatever wind, storm, rain, thunder or snow that might get in their way.

We have a fabulous Compliance team,  who takes care that the letters that go to the mailbags have the proper destination, and the required stamp.

We have a awesome Customer Support team, who is like the postman that delivers the letter to the final destination, always with a smile and taking worries away.

We have a incredible Sales team, who is managing to get as many mailboxes we can, so people can find us easily and give us the letters they have written, hoping that they will get delivered in no time.

We have a great Marketing team, who takes care about the stamps being nice and collectable, about making all of us look good, printing books and posters so people know what services we provide.

The Finance and Admin team, who takes care that there will always be a hot cup of coffee available, no matter how late it is, or the storm and the rain and the fact that we are in the middle of the ocean, and that getting coffee abroad requires a lot of planning.

And there is a Product team, who operates the rudder and the engine telegraph, who masters the sextant and the maps, so we know were we have been and which route we should follow next.

And last but not least, there is a Captain, who takes care of all of us.

I been working in this company for three years now, and even that we had good and hard times together, I know, that with this crew, we will prove that it can be done. That payments to schools can become a simple task for our users, with a low cost and a few days of process. We are going to prove that mail can be delivered by plane in 4 days from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro for the price of a stamp.

Working in this startup is nothing like riding a rollercoaster, this feeling of going up and down we experience from time to time... is just because of the endless immensity of the sea.

What I got back from EuroStar - Restore to Factory Settings: What to Do When a Change Programme Goes Wrong by Isabel Evans

Since I attended the EuroStar conference, I would like to write down a little about talks I went to, just to put together notes, pictures and toughs.

Restore to Factory Settings: What to Do When a Change Programme Goes Wrong by Isabel Evans.

Isabel started her talk explaining what influence diagrams were about. And since the example found at Wikipedia is TLWR, she used a simple example.

She told us that when she gets sad, then she eats chocolate.
when she eats chocolate, then she gains weight.
When she gains weight, she gets sad.

And expressed this with a simple influence diagram.

Instead of using a mindmap where some items are related or belong to some others, in a influence diagram there is a circular relationship between all elements, creating a ecosystem of influences that helps us understand change, or why things got to a certain state.

Once this was clear, she moved on and explained how she started working for a big company with the mission of improve testing, and how she found out that it was not enough to improve testing, but that a lot of global improvements across the whole company had to take place in order to improve testing.

Check out her initial plan in green, and the influences she found out that were happening in red:

Also, she found out how the influence of management was impacting the developers, and came up with another nice diagram:

At the end of her talk, she linked her example to Joels law of leaky abstractions and how this law does not only apply to software, but also to process and relations inside the company.

What I got out of it:
I wasn't aware of influence diagrams as a powerful tool to explain circular cause-effect conditions, but since this talk, I think it's going to be a new tool in my belt.

At our peerTransfer office we have a nice influence diagram about development speed, just by the coffee machine.

You can find Isabel at Twitter, there is a nice interview at the Ministry of Testing and you can listen to her keynote at the EuroStar site.