Friday, June 9, 2017

Nordic testing days - day 1

So, the tutorials day is over, and the first day of talks began.
For starters, it was a lot more crowded. With ~500 attendees, it's the largest testing conference I attended, and the atmosphere is absolutely electrifying. A lot of things to learn and experience, and a whole lot of new people to meet.
With so much going on, I could probably babble about the experiences I had for quite a while, but instead I want to pinpoint some of the highlights of the day.
First to be mentioned is Franziska Sauerwein's workshop on refactoring JUnit tests. I'm quite comfortable with Java, so I came with the expectation of learning new coding habits by watching other people's (in this case - Franzi's) way of coding. And indeed, that is mostly what I got. The workshop went pretty well, at least as far as I can determine, and I got out with several pointers on how to improve some of the code I am writing (also, need to check Hamcrest, with which I was not familiar before). A workshop that makes a very clear promise, and then delivers it exactly.
Similarly, Kevin Harris's talk about losing third of the testers and surviving that. When a crisis happens, you must adapt, and Kevin shared with us some of the extreme measures they had to take to cope with this change. Some of them, probably, are better off when done with the luxury of time at hand - and even if they don't, they sure seem like the right thing to do (others, on the other hand, are crisis-only action, so I hope not to ever need them, but I'm stacking them in memory just in case).
The final keynote of the day was given by Alan Richardson, and was all about taking control of the way each of us treats testing. It was not a new message, but it sure was very inspiring and super important for new testers, while remaining not less important reminder to the rest.
And so, the day was concluded.
Or was it?
A conference dinner shortly followed, and then some sort of a party - with disco-lights and drummers. I took the chance to get some 20 minutes of quiet time before returning for the lightning talks and the Powerpoint karaoke - both of were real fun. I especially liked Gwen Diagram's lightning talk which was a very fast-paced,foul-mouthed ode to rapid development named "me and Mr. T".

A long day, and quite a fun one at that. Now, for the final day of the conference, where I'll be presenting my talk.
How did the Romans say? Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant.

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