I was asked by @TestPappy to blog about the last ConTest meetup and I will try to give a short summary on what happened. Unfortunately I had forgotten my note book and I am only left with trust in my memories from the meeting, so please if YOU were there feel free to add to the post in the comments.
If you haven’t heard about ConTest you can read about it on Sigge’s blog.
The theme this time was very broad; Planning, strategy and organisation. About thirty people showed up but only two lightning talks (of 5 minutes each) was suggested. It turned out to be enough though to cover the entire meetup.
Baldvin Gislason Bern was first to give his lightning talk about “The rise and the fall of the test plan”. He shared his story on how he went from introducing an ISO standard inspired test plan template to getting rid of it. The test plan that he is working on to introduce in his organisation, is based on a lot of questions to trigger the test leaders to think.
The insights he shared from this journey was:
- Introducing the test plan template had one positive thing in the organisation. Showing the existence of software testing.
- Introducing the test plan template was also positive triggering discussions to avoid shallow agreements.
- The test plan was/is not a living document. This is something Baldvin wants to change with his new format. This is the fall of the test plan template. They have now reached a plateau where change is needed. Either change of the template or perhaps eliminating the test plan itself.
- The test plan template was much appreciated by some managers who used it as a contract for allocating resources.
The open season trigger many questions and comments. Some of the discussions were about:
- What is shallow agreements?
- What do you mean by test plan? We had any different views of what a test plan is.
- Who is the test plan for? If the stakeholders are not interested who is it then for?
After the break where carbs, carbs, carbs, grease and a few slices of protein were served it was time for the second lightning talk by Håkan Ramberg.
Håkan shared his experience from being a very administrative test leader. He worked in a project where he had testers in five different scrum teams. Håkan coordinated test activities, got rid of obstacles and coordinated activities with different stakeholders.
The insight he shared from his experience:
- He prefers to be a hands-on test leader. He does not like to work as an administrative test leader
- The test plan was some sort of a contract with the customer.
- The set-up with one test leader, one project leader, scrum masters for each team and testers in each development team worked very well for this project.
And sorry to be honest some where by 19:30 I went in to a carb coma…
Next ConTest is honoured by James Bach’s presence. See you there!
(I will try to bring my notebook next time)
Tweets:
Curiousity killed the cat 
In Håkans talk there where a lot of questions from a company which had a similar setup but where missing the Håkan role.
There where also a developer in the crowd which caused some interesting questions e.g. if testers can do development work and developer do test work in a sprint.