TL;DR

This post is about talks that I watched at TestBash Home 2020. We had recordings of previous talks, live talks, and panels. Here is my learning experience!

Live by Joao Proenca: Should We Just … Delete It?

I attended this as a live talk at European Testing Conference 2020. Here you can read what I learned. With time distance of three months and newly gained experience with writing tests for my home project application, I have an addition to my blog post. End to end tests that are not written in the framework in which application is developed should not be written in the first place. For tests that are written in the application development test framework, the test should be deleted at the same time when the application code is deleted.

Replay by Angie Jones: Revisited: How To Get Automation Included In Your Definition Of Done.

In my blog post Do Not Waste Your Money On Testing Automation Team, I wrote my thinking on software testers doing “automation testing.” I think that there is value in “automation,” but my basic premise is that it should be done exclusively by developers. Software testers could contribute a much productive way. This post is not “emotionally” driven but is based on a project where I effectively worked as a tester without a need to write a line of code (at least code that was saved and madly and repeatedly run as part of regression test).

Replay by Aby Phillips: The tester’s survival guide to joining a continuous delivery project.

I was actually present at that recording. Here is what I learned. Someone in the audience had a very heavy cough. Example how context matters 🙂

Live by Maryam Umar: Inspiration And Burnout

Maryam shared her story of how she survived a severe case of work burnout and stress. I had a case of work burnout, but my body managed to recover. Her story will definitely help me to identify any future burnout situation and how to cope with it. What stuck with me was: Hold tight to good mentor!

Live by Shey Crompton, Nicola Sedgwick, Alessandra Moreira: Leadership Panel

Nothing new for me here. I am trying to keep up to date with leadership/management skills. In the chat window, I found about leadership book, Radical Condor, posted by Mike Lyles. That was my takeaway from this session.

Live by Jenny Bramble: The Only Good Quality Metric Is Morale

I totally misunderstood this talk. Definition of morale:

the confidence, enthusiasm, and discipline of a person or group at a particular time: their morale was high.

And I thought about Moral:

concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character

One letter makes the significant difference!

Recorded by Martin Hynie: Revisited: What’s in a name? Experimenting With Testing Job Titles

I got nothing from this talk. Martin worked at this time for a company that was developing software for the aerospace industry. I guess that they had a lot of money. He was managing a software testing team that did not get any testing work because of the testing word in the department name. So they had experimented with various names for the testing team. And that lasted for several years. Nothing much about how to do actual testing.

Q&A Sessions

After each talk (live or recorded), the speaker answered questions (asked during the talk in question system) in live mode. There was a lot of time, and questions with most votes from the audience were served first. Not served questions were moved into the Ministry Of Testing Club thread, where the author also get a chance to answer them.

99 Seconds Talks

The last session was second batch of 99 seconds talk. You put your topic in question area, and the audience voted on it. The topic with the most votes was recorded first.

I talked about my idea Rules Of Three. Here are other interesting 99 talks:

• 3 whys why not to code
• how to sketch note
• optimism and testing ( I just love this one)
• Hacks to protect your testing career
• Song about MoT
• I learned docker, so can you
• Testing Yourself
• Stop doing highly scripted testing
• How a dry mask is made

Conclusion

This was my first online conference, I am eagerly waiting for new TestBash event. My next booked online conference is from the other side of the continent: Tribal Qonf