At the BDD and Agile Testing exchange conference on Friday we held an informal direction meeting for the Agile Testing UK user group. Many thanks to everyone who participated. For those of you who were too lazy or too drunk by that point, here are some of the conclusions:
- Experience reports seem to be the most effective thing we can do now in 90 minutes given the numbers that typically attend the meetings. Practical workshops like the one I did on refining acceptance tests are very hard to facilitate with 70-80 people. Tool reports don’t seem that interesting any more unless they present something very new.
- Pekka Klarck’s half-day workshop on Robot Framework was received very well and that might be the solution for 90-minute tool overview problems. I’ll try to organise a few more half-day workshops with Skills Matter this year presenting different tools. The guys from TechTalk seemed interested in running a workshop on Specflow, so I’ll have to follow up on that.
- Several interesting suggestions for meetings came up, including exploratory testing dojos (with pair testing) and openspace discussions
- In retrospect, we noticed a lack of business analysts in our meetings – there are a lot of testers and programmers, but it would be nice to get BAs involved as well.
- To address the last two points, we plan to organise an exploratory testing dojo (Mike Scott and Tony Bruce volunteered to facilitate it) where developers and testers will pair up to compete, and an openspace “bring your BA” day, roughly on the topic of ‘where do we want to go with this?’
So my goal for the next year is to schedule more experience reports, invite people to speak about tools only if they are very innovative and organise some larger half-day workshops on tools. Which tools would you like to try out?
The plan for the next few meetings is as follows:
- December 7th: Mark Crowther presents an experience report on Specification by Example
- Jan 26th 2011: Richard Paul on Acceptance Testing with Geb
- Feb 23rd 2011: (most likely) Richard Glew on agile testing at Disney
- Mar 30th 2011: Exploratory testing dojo
- Apr 27th 2011: “Bring your BA” openspace evening on where do we want to go with agile specifications/testing/bdd
You can sign up for the first two by clicking on the links, and I’ll publish more information on the other events in due course. As always, you can track updates at agiletesting.org.uk or subscribe to our mailing list to get notified about future events.
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