All posts by Mindful tester

Speaking, Teach things

Bonus Workshop Preparation Stage

Some thoughts:
“Are you really ready for your Agile Testing Days workshop?”
“No. Slides need to be updated. There are concept handouts. I still need to tweak.”
“So what is that bonus stage?”

Dreadful stage

The Bonus Workshop Preparation sSage starts after the dreadful stage, the stage without progress.

Progress can be measured in number of sheets or number of the exercises. I prefer the number of usable ideas for attendees. Customer centric. Sounds Agile to me.

2 weeks before my holiday I was in the dreadful stage. One of my website exercises became smaller instead of bigger. I used all tricks to get a baseline, but I failed.

I realised that I had to step back. The only solution I had was to fall back on an older version of the software. Within a few days I had a better solution.

Bonus stage

Another way to determine the bonus stage is the feedback of my reviewers.

My basic question: were they engaged?
My observation: yes.

I paid attention to words and the way they were pronounced. I looked at the body language. Most important: did they learn something?

What would I more include in my workshop?

  • an one pager
  • list of extra resources
  • a mind map
  • visual clues for exercises

“You can always change your workshop.”
My wife

Proper stage name

Last weekend I talked about my workshop with one of my kids. I told that one reviewer and I missed an obvious bug in the website. I was amused.

I told about some jokes how to illustrate my points. We had a good laugh about it.

The bonus part is also the fun part. The part which will make a workshop good or great.

Mind mapping, Speaking, Teach things

Workshop Mind Maps

Can I make a mind map for a 2  hour workshop?
Nope.

First set

Over a few months I have to give a long workshop about European privacy laws and Exploratory Testing. Sometimes it is tempting to put all the information in one extra extra extra large mind map.

Giving me a disappointing delay in processing information.
Forget it.

Wait. I use several mind maps.

Yes. That is more comfortable.

In this blog post I will show titles of mind maps to prepare myself for my workshop at Agile Testing Days.

It took me months to make these mind maps. This is my way to collect more information than I would be able to share.

This gives me enough space to tailor the workshop on the spot.
Did you ever tried to entertain people for 20 minutes?
I will have to teach people for 2 hours.
Good luck. To me.

Why do I share information about my mind maps?
It will give the delegates some hints what I will tell.
I also want to share my preparation with newbie speakers.

Another reason is to attract more diverse speakers on stage. Preparations is like taking small steps.

There are even sessions for speaking at the same conference.

So what are you waiting for?

In order to avoid boredom I just select a few mind maps for a small introduction.

T
There is no way to predict the people in my audience. So I made a lot of categories. Next to the beginners, I have exercises for experienced testers, testers using tools, and managers.

An experienced tester knows what a dataflow test is. Now I also have to explain this to a manager. But I come back later to DiSSS.

Second set

The framework of my workshop is in the  file ‘Talk Lawful Thing to test 1c’. If this sounds strange to you, I completely understand you. It started as a talk and grew to a workshop.

After a while I could not add new perspectives. So I made some other mind maps.

Resources are things you can use after my workshop. This part seems relatively simple. I only had to put in some good resources in it. I made this exercise challenging for myself by adding information written by women.

A good opening or intro of the workshop sets the atmosphere for the coming hours. If I will casually tell something to complete strangers at the beginning of the workshop, it is because I rehearsed it more than 100 times.

Up till now I could not find a shortcut.
Rinse and repeat.

Third set

Tim Ferris has a never ending serie of experiments.

Yes, I made a typo in the file name. And for me it is about speed.

A mind map with central object Lawful thing – Ferris which has branches DiSSS, Jokes, and CaFE. The branch DiSSS has sub branches Deconstruct, Selection, Sequence, and Stakes. The sub branch café has sub branches Compression, Frequency, and Encoding.

Tim developed some acronyms like DiSSS.

  • Deconstruction is the first action to understand how people perform tasks.
  • Selection is the second task to select which techniques have the most impact.
  • Sequence: what is the best order of actions?
  • Stakes: what’s in it for me?

CaFE

  • Compression: how can I compress the information on 1 page?
  • Frequency: how often should I do it to become good?
  • Encoding: what is a good way to encode the information? Like CaFE.

Is it possible to use these acronyms for GDPR testing?
I think so.
The dataflow test is a good candidate for Selection.
I wrote you I would come back to DiSSS.

The first test session needs extra attention from my side.
During my workshop there are several sessions during which delegates are going to test. Hands on is different from watching. It is like a tennis game with everyone on the tennis court.
And I am the referee.

The mind map ‘20190528 add Lawful thing’ contains information I still need to process.

A workshop is like work.

Speaking matters

In this blog post I share my latest progress on my speaking.
One of my reasons is to get more diverse speakers on stage.

The making and the scale of my mind maps might intimidate newbie speakers.

What I left out, is my adding of nodes in the mind maps over time. This could be days apart.

What I left out, is the long study.
If I add 1 branch to a mind map every day, I have a mind map of 365 branches after a year. I started in the summer of 2018.

If I go in more details, the more branches I will add on a single day.

A talk takes time.

Learning, Legal, Privacy, Programming, Secure things, Techies conferring

The Clokie Project

In December 2018 Katherina Clokie, a known speaker, announced to look more outside the Tester community.

My reaction

Amazement, grief.

After a few months I realised that it was not a bad idea.

My change of heart

My wife has some really tough questions I have to answer. The biggest one is:
“What did you learn?”
Right behind each test conference.

So I reduced my number of test conferences and number of hours at the conferences. There are still some really good conferences like TestBash, Agile Testing Days, and European Testing Conference with plenty of awesome few insights.

I attended a lot of other conferences and after a while I would be just happy to pick up something new.

There is more to gain at a conference if you only know the basics. With more than 20 years of experience it is a way less.

It was time for my Clokie project.


Time for a small flashback to October and November 2018. I already had looked outside the Test Community.

Here are some notes from Infosecurity 2018:
In case of doubt treat data as personal data. Zip code and house number are personal data.

In EU there are several privacy government organisations, but they have different focus on privacy issues.

Steps in case of data breach:
Secure proof
Look in the logging
Determine scope
Communicate
Remediate
Learn

A change of behaviour can indicate an identity theft.

The way of accessing data in the cloud is the weakest link.

In GDPR, the European Privacy Law, a penalty is used to let the company feel the pain instead of putting a company out of business.

GDPR is not applicable for dead persons. But there can be other laws which are applicable for dead persons.

Meet the expos

How to attract people to an expo? Goodies, free access, and talks.

Some Healthcare and ICT notes of me in random order
Anonymize pictures, determine objects of interest, and annotate them using smart software.

First step is vision and then involve stakeholders like care providers, health insurers, and suppliers.

Patient panel discovered that 60 % of the patients want a personal health environment.

Care providers like hospitals and doctors are stimulated. They get money on basis of results and not on actions taken.

Law of customer’s rights. E.g. A care provider should only get information which is needed for the care to be provided.

Misconfiguration is becoming the weakest point in defense.

Meet the meetups

010dev is a small meetup in Rotterdam. It has Dutch characteristics like gezellig (cosy) and Buy Own Drink. It is in a pub after all. Once in a whole while it is in a company.

During my meetups there are no lectures, but I still listened a lot. As a tester was I am able to follow the small talk and tech talk?

In a few hours a lot of subjects passed. Programming languages, projects, and new trends were discussed. Somehow I could understand bits and pieces.

Developers.nl had a more traditional format for the meetup: free drinks, free meals, and free lectures.

I went to two meetups. The first one was abstract. It was about architecture. What are good guiding principles to set up a complex environment?

The second meetup was about vue.js. This was a challenging one. I had only basic knowledge about JavaScript and HTML. So I read some ebooks about vue.js which are based on these languages.

This talk was more understandable for me. The speaker shared some tips about vue.js.

How to speed up the performance by loading the needed content in 2 stages? First the necessary stuff was loaded for the web page. The rest followed while the user had a first impression of the page.

Looking under the hood

My blog has been made with WordPress. One day I was blogging and a conference in Rotterdam was announced in the dashboard.

There were some particular benefits: 25 Euro for a ticket including lunch, an environment friendly environment, meeting other WordPress users, short traveling distance.

As a tester I had not had a chance to attend a talk about accessibility. I honestly don’t understand this.

This conference offered more talks about this subject than I could process. I skipped the last ones.

Another interesting subject was security headers. It is possible to make WordPress secure. I was thinking that a header only contained some information.

For the interested reader have a look at my conference digest mind map.

Finishing thoughts

Retro: did I learn more than previous years?
Yes.

But what did I pick up in those previous years?
Mostly subjects related to programming and law. Less about testing.

Just made me think.


On Twitter Trish Koo placed a thought provoking tweet. In order to become better in software development  you have to learn both testing and programming.