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Wednesday 6 June 2012

The tired travelling man (with no business-cards to share at the event)

The last day came and went at the Nordic Testing Days 2012 -conference  and feeling a bit sentimental. I feel like I left a whole bunch of new friends behind the pond: Raivo Päts, Kaspar Loog and Kristjan Karmo to name a few. The last day as a milestone for me also as I held my first conference talk which was a workshop about Heuristic testing using Mind maps. I have video and slides about the workshop, and also some pictures when I get my hands on them. Main thing was that I had a blast and I got the impression that at least some people got something out of the workshop too.

So today didn't go as planned but I feel I made the right choices overall. I saw Mr. Rex Black talk about Quality management (which I will be doing a minor post later), I held my exhausting workshop (which I will analyse with more depth and because I like to talk about myself ;) ) and a long hands-on exploratory testing workshop by Mart Toom (a great guy with a knack for ET - I'll write a good analysis fattened with constructive feedback). I was planning to take the shorter workshop and attend the tracks, but I felt that I would get/share (the experience) more if I was able to participate in the workshop.

I have all my notes in mind maps. I will try to get them online as soon as possible for all the tracks. Some are less extensive than the others but I will write posts of the most interesting ones (not to say the others were not interesting but I may not have enough to share about those.

So, tomorrow I will be heading to Technical University of Tampere to join the Testauspäivät ("Testing days") and to have a lightning talk about mind maps and exploratory testing. Let's see how that event turns out... ;) Hopefully even more friends and peers to talk about testing with! :D

- Peksi, the tired travelling man with no business-cards to share at the event

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You saw Rex Black speak? I wonder what your impression was. Can you tell the difference between a Context-Driven tester and a Factory School guy?

-- James Bach

Pekka Marjamäki said...

Hi, James.

I will give a deeper analysis about the talk. There were some things that required challenging and I will address those issues on a separate blog post.

I do realize that he's a consultant and he has to put out a good impression, but face-to-face he's a nice guy. I don't agree with all that he said and I will bring up the good stuff on my blog.

The difference to me is quite simple: "The guy who walks with a golden hammer in his hand, sees only nails. The guy who has a belt full of tools, sees possibilities." But all of them have brains in their head thus making them able to become better at testing. Should we use our brains to improve?

I'm not to say I want to repeat other people's mistakes, but to learn from them (and not do them myself if possible). I wan't to support the good behavior and ignore the bad (just like training a dog). So even if I could see the difference, I seek it not, but the good behavior in both and try to boost it.

BR, Peksi