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.

What I got back from EuroStar - Every Tester has a price, by Michael Bolton.

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.

Every Tester Has a PRICE: Sources of Product and Project Information by Michael Bolton @michaelbolton.

This man has taught me a lot about Software Testing, so attending to his talk was in my plan. Not because I haven't been to any of his talks before, but just because I knew I'll learn something out of it.

Michael is also a musician, and the way he performed his talk reminded me a lot to those times when musicians gather together to teach and learn from each other, first explaining what they are going to do, then doing it slowly and finally playing the whole set so the music sounds with it's intended form and the harmonies happen to make total sense.

We went to the room at the conference, and it happened to be totally crowded, so after a glance he decided that whatever format he had planned for his talk wouldn't work, so he improvised using a laptop and xmind a tool for doing mindmaps.

He talked about handling expectations, about how for a single test you should not expect a single result, about how requirements live in collective heads, in collective tacit knowledge.

And then he asked the assistants to outline where a tester could gather information about testing, and many things came out, like Requirements, Competing products, Marketing campaigns, Regulations, Bug reports...
At some point he had his screen full of items, (about 50 of them) you could use to get information about what you should be testing and making questions about.

But all these items were messed around the screen, so the eureka! moment came when he told us that there are four types of Information:
- Reference: Information that is written somewhere.
- Conference: Information that you get when talking with people.
- Inference: Information you get when you use something, or people use to do in a certain way.
- Experience: Information you got from experiments you did, or from things you know how to do.

And he allocated each of the items to one of these four types, explaining how each one could belong to a certain type of information and making totally sense out of the previous mess.

What I got out from it:
Well, I already knew how important it is for a tester to have information about what he is testing, what the context is about and what matters and why. Bolton reminded me that when I search for information, there are a lot of places to go and to have in mind, it's just a matter of using your imagination.

I haven't found this talk at the internets, but if you are curious I can recommend you his talk about Agile Testing Quadrants and maybe, to check in his page and take a Rapid Software Testing class whenever that might be. I took that training in May 2012, and it set my testing career looking (so far) at the right direction.

What I got back from EuroStar - The Internet of things.

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.

The Internet of Things by Andy Stanford-Clark @andysc 

Andy explained to the audience what the so called 'Internet of things' is about connecting to the internet devices that traditionally didn't have connectivity.

This idea is hitting the big industry, and he used his own example of how his family is measuring their home energy consumption, how he collects the data, analyse it and learn things out from it.

To put it short, he developed a series of devices so he would track the electricity consumption, open windows, weather forecast, temperature, mousetraps and some system behind that would tweet any news regarding his home. (things like "living room window has been open for 3 hours", or "Mouse trap in studio just caught a mouse", you get the idea...)

And over the layer of measurements, he added another layer of intelligence, so his home would tweet advice to set the washing machine on, based on current electricity consumption and a good weather forecast.

What he was explaining, is that business of any kind need to find new ways to deal with customers. Be that by connecting devices to the internet, offering services in the cloud, by managing data or by providing intelligence.

He explained us how his future was like, and he warned us, that one day, your toilet is going to suggest you to visit the doctor, and your insurance company is going to offer you such a toilet.

What I got out of it:
I loved to see how Andy was able to put together simple solutions to deal with a complex problem, that's engineering at its best state. I also got a curiosity about how much energy our home is consuming, and I'm considering trying out some the stuff that can be found at efergy or opendomo.

PD. I found a similar talk Andy gave at a TEDx event, it's not exactly the same, but it might be worth 16 minutes of your life.

 

Thank you for EuroStar 2014

Last week I went to EuroStar conference in Dublin, and it was a blast!

Dublin Conference Center

I have to say that this was totally unexpected to me. I tried to win a ticket at the greentester contest, but didn't make it, and even that I have a budget for trainings and conferences, EuroStar was just too much for me.

But then, one month ago, Rosie Sherry emailed me asking if I would go to Dublin if she managed to get me a ticket, and my answer was "Yes, sure!".

So, the conference has been grand!, I attended to great talks, knew a lot of people and had a lot of fun.

But first things first, I have to say Thank you...

Thank you Rosie Sherry for getting me a ticket to the conference, I had a great time in Dublin and it happened to be a great experience.

Thank you Morten Hougaard, who came up with a ticket for the gala dinner, so I could join the crowd in this event.

Thank you Michael Larsen, for sitting down with me, letting me complete a challenge and providing a Miagi-Do brown belt which I will wear with honour.

Thank you to Emma, Guna, Ru and the rest of the Test Lab folks for making the lab the best place to be in the conference. Perfect to practice stuff and complete challenges. Hugo and I were able to solve the black box, and the feeling of satisfaction was worth the struggle.

Thank you to the people behind the EuroStar conference, I saw you all working very hard so the conference would be a success, and because it was, you deserve every nice word about how it went.

Thank you to my team at peerTransfer, for testing all issues that came to my kanban slot while I was at the conference, so when I got back to the office I didn't have a mountain of issues waiting to get tested.

You people rock! and I am grateful to all of you for this experiences I had.

And last but not least, thank you Empar, my beloved wife, for rowing my same boat, in the same direction, for running our family while I'm miles away,

My plan for the EuroStar Conference.

There is a quote I like from George S. Patton: "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week."

Next week I expect to be at EuroStar conference in Dublin, so I need a plan, and better if it is now!

I have checked Rob Lambert's Unnofficial Guide for attending EuroStar.

I made my Checklist:
Business Cards.
Camera && Charger.
Notebook && Pencils.
Map of budget car parking location && Plane ticket.
Laptop && Charger.
Phone && USB cable.
Electric plug adaptor, as Ireland has the same plugs that British do.
... and the rest of the stuff you take when you go 2 nights on travel.

I also have a plan for those talks that seems interesting to me:

It's not a perfect plan, and it won't happen like that for sure,  some things are going to change, but that's okay, after all, as Helmuth von Moltke the Elder once said: "No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force."

It's not just a watch.

In November I went to Brighton for a one day mobile testing training. This subject is getting interesting to follow, not because it's the future, but because it's the present, just that many choose to live in the past.

One of the things we talked about was the future of mobile devices, and here it seems that we will face three tendencies.
New phones, with new features, screen resolutions, sensors, operation systems and so on..
RFID sensors everywhere, at supermarkets, trains, stores, cars...
Wereable devices, and here comes my story...

Two months ago I needed to change my watch. My old Casio broke its glass and water was making the way to the inside case, getting it difficult to read, so after searching a bit around, I decided to get a Garmin VivoFit.

And, just for trying it out nicely, I got a spare one for my wife, so we both started experimenting with this wereable device.

The gadget is basically a pedometer that you wear in your wrist and also gives you the time of the day, so I didn’t have to get a new watch. But it does some other things too.

It has a little red bar, that comes out when I been sitting down for more than 1 hour, warning me that I should start thinking about getting myself back on the move.
It also keeps track of how many steps I been taking, and every day he suggest a goal, based on my previous days, so I know how many steps I am missing for the day.

These features can be useless if you decide to ignore them, but if you don’t, they keep you walking to the office and not taking the elevator when you get back home.


...And when you set up your age and weight, it can calculate the calories you are burning as you go, so you have a measure about how you are doing today. Here is where the fun starts.

To put it simple, let’s say that our body needs calories to burn in order to perform any activity, so, it burns calories when we walk, when we run, but it stops burning calories when we sit down for a while.

Available calories can be refilled into our body by eating and drinking, but some food has more calories than others, so water has none, fruit has a few, cookies and soda have a lot of them. If you eat too much and exercise too little, you body has to keep these calories somewhere, as I noticed last summer when I had to get a new pair of jeans with a larger waist size.

So the point here is to keep track of how much you are burning and refilling, just to know where you stand.

Still this gadget doesn’t measure it all, because it’s a simple pedometer, it can not detect when you are cycling, or swimming… for these I use Endomondo so whenever I choose to ride the bike I can still keep track on how much sugar I might be burning.

This is cool to keep track of the burnt calories, so what about the ones I am eating?

For that we found MyFitnessPal, a nice collaborative app where you can keep track of what you are eating and how many calories that is supposed to contain.

And the great thing here is that these 3 apps can sync together. At the end of the day, I can get a estimated balance about how I am doing.

Off course, all this is based on guesstimations, but it’s okay as long you are aware, I just want to know if I been walking too little, or eating too much, I don't need too much precision on this.

Some people have healthy habits, they understood time ago, that if they wanted to keep fit, they needed to watch out what they were eating, and they also needed to do some exercise, I think this gadget can be pretty useless for them.

But for us, my wife and me, it quite helps having a little control of how we are doing, and once we got some numbers, we started walking a bit more and eating a bit less.

This is the start of our journey into the wereables, two devices and three apps that communicates with each other, storing information in the cloud and providing information to users across many platforms, and this is just the beginning, just wait and see.

Mobile Testing with Stephen Janaway

This November I went back to Brighton.

Rosie Sherry and The Ministry of Testing have come up with two weeks of awesome training events, but given my limited budget, I had to choose one day to attend, so this time I went for the Mobile Testing day.

The trip went just fine, as I bought my tickets early, I could have a cheap flight from our sunny small town airport in Valencia...

...to the big and rainy one in Gatwick.

Once in Brighton, this training thing had two different events, One was attending the training day, and the other was hanging out with testers.

Mobile Testing with Stephen Janaway.

For this training session we sat down in groups in big round tables, so we had plenty of space to talk and to take notes. Stephen had some slides supporting his talk, and there were whiteboards so we could draw things at the exercise times.

We talked among others about:
What mobile was about, and why we should test on mobile.
What mobile testing was about.
What submitting to app stores was like.
How to approach to Mobile Testing automation.
Why you should test on the train instead of the office.

We did some work about:
Drawing a mindmap about how we would test a app that would take pictures.
Ponting out differences on the same app while running on different OS.
Testing real life apps looking for real life bugs.

At the end, testing is still testing, so when it's about a feature, all learnings and knowledge a functional tester has are valid.
But because it is hosted on this mobile device, the context changes and impacts a lot, this requires to focus on it, understand how it impacts and spend time testing it.

It's not just a device with a smaller screen.

If you are interested in mobile testing, I can recommend you this video and this book, as well as joining Stephen in his next training session wherever that might be.

Hanging out with Testers.

Because these training days are happening in a row, it happens that if you reserve some spare time, you can hang out with the testers that came for the previous day session, and with those who are to join the next one, so I had the chance to meet a nice bunch of testers.

I had a great time in Brighton,  and I'm really looking forward for Testbash2015