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CAST 2018 Debrief

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the Conference of the Association of Software Testing, CAST 2018. I had been to academic conferences with collaborators before, and a local STAR conference here in Toronto, but this was my first time travelling for a professional conference in testing. The actual experience ended up being quite trying, and I ended up learning as much about myself as about testing. I don’t feel the need to detail my whole experience here, but I will highlight the top 5 lessons I took away from it.

1. “Coaching” is not what I hoped it was

I’ve been hearing a lot about “coaching” as a role for testers lately. I went to both Anne-Marie Charrett‘s tutorial and Jose Lima‘s talk on the subject thinking that it was a path I wanted to pursue. I went in thinking about using as a tool to change minds, instill a some of my passion for testing into the people I work with, and building up a culture of quality. I came away with a sense of coaching as more of a discussion method, a passive enterprise available for those who want to engage in it and useless for the uninterested. I suspect those who work as coaches would disagree, but that was nonetheless my impression.

One theme that came up from a few people, not just the speakers, was a distinction between coaching and teaching. This isn’t something I really understand, and is likely part of why I was expecting something else from the subject. I taught university tutorials for several years and put a lot of effort into designing engaging classes. To me, what I saw described as coaching felt like a subset of teaching, a particular style of pedagogy, not something that stands in contrast to it. Do people still hear “teaching” and think “lecturing”? I heard “coaching testing” and expected a broader mandate of education and public outreach that I associate with “teaching”.

Specifically, I was looking for insight on breaking through to people who don’t like testing, and who don’t want to learn about it, but very quickly saw that “coaching” wasn’t going to help me with that. At least not on the level at which we got into it in within one workshop. I am sure that this is something that would be interesting to hash out in a (meta) coaching session with people like Anne-Marie and Jose, even James Bach and Michael Bolton: i.e. people who have much more knowledge about how coaching can be used than I do.

2. I’m more “advanced” than I thought

My second day at the conference was spent in a class billed as “Advanced Automation” with Angie Jones (@techgirl1908). I chose this tutorial over other equally enticing options because it looked like the best opportunity for something technically oriented, and would produce a tangible artefact — an advanced automated test suite — that I could show off at home and assimilate aspects of into my own automation work.

Angie did a great job of walking us through implementing the framework and justifying the thought process each step of the way. It was a great exercise for me to go through implementing a java test suite from scratch, including a proper Page Object Model architecture and a TDD approach. It was my first time using Cucumber in java, and I quite enjoyed the commentary on hiring API testers as we implemented a test with Rest-Assured.

Though I did leave with that tangible working automation artefact at the end of the day, I did find that a reverse-Pareto principle at play with 80% of the value coming from the last 20% of the time. This is what lead to my take away that I might be more advanced than I had thought. I still don’t consider myself an expert programmer, but I think I could have gotten a lot further had we started with a basic test case already implemented. Interestingly Angie’s own description for another workshop of hers say “It’s almost impossible to find examples online that go beyond illustrating how to automate a basic login page,” though that’s the example we spent roughly half the day on. Perhaps we’ve conflated “advanced” with “well designed”.

3. The grass is sometimes greener

In any conference, talks will vary both in quality generally and how much they resonate with any speaker specifically. I was thrilled by John Cutler‘s keynote address on Thursday — he struck many chords about the connection between UX and testing that align very closely with my own work — but meanwhile Amit Wertheimer just wrote that he “didn’t connect at all” to it. I wasn’t challenged by Angie’s advanced automation class but certainly others in the room were. This is how it goes.

In a multi-track conference, there’s an added layer that there’s other rooms you could be in that you might get more value from. At one point, I found myself getting dragged down in a feeling that I was missing out on better sessions on the other side of the wall. Even though there were plenty of sessions where I know I was in the best room for myself, the chatter on Twitter and the conference slack workspace sometimes painted a picture of very green grass elsewhere. Going back to Amit’s post, he called Marianne Duijst‘s talk about Narratology and Harry Potter one of the highlights of the whole conference, and I’ve seen a few others echo the same sentiment on Twitter. I had it highlighted on my schedule from day one but at the last minute was enticed by the lightning talks session. I got pages of notes from those talks, but I can’t help but wonder what I missed. Social Media FOMO is real and it takes a lot of mental energy to break out of that negative mental cycle.

Luckily, the flip side of that kind of FOMO is that asking about a session someone else was in, or gave themselves, is a great conversation starter during the coffee breaks.

4. Networking is the worst

For other conferences I’ve been to, I had the benefit either of going with a group of collaborators I already knew or being a local so I could go home at 5 at not worry about dinner plans. Not true when flying alone across the continent. I’ve always been an introvert at the best of times, and I had a hard time breaking out of that to go “network”.

I was relieved when I came across Lisa Crispin writing about how she similarly struggled when she first went to conferences, although that might have helped me more last week than today. Though I’m sure it was in my imagination just as much as it was in hers at her first conference, I definitely felt the presence of “cliques” that made it hard to break in. Ironically, those that go to conferences regularly are less likely to see this happening, since those are the people that already know each other. Speakers and organizers even less so.

It did get much easier once we moved to multiple shorter sessions in the day (lots of coffee breaks) and an organized reception on Wednesday. I might have liked an organized meet-and-greet on the first day, or even the night before the first tutorial, where an introvert like me can lean a bit more on the social safety net of mandated mingling. Sounds fun when I put it like that, right?

I eventually got comfortable enough to start talking with people and go out on a limb here or there. I introduced myself to the all people I aimed to and asked all the questions I wanted to ask… eventually. But there were also a lot of opportunities that I could have taken better advantage of. At my next conference, this is something I can do better for myself, though it also gives me a bit more sensitivity about what inclusion means.

5. I’m ready to start preparing my own talk

Despite my introverted tendencies I’ve always enjoyed teaching, presenting demos, and giving talks. I’ve had some ideas percolating in the back of my mind about what I can bring to the testing community and my experiences this week — in fact every one of the four points above — have confirmed for me that speaking at a conference is a good goal for myself, and that I do have some value to add to the conversation. I have some work to do.

Bonus lessons: Pronouncing “Cynefin” and that funny little squiggle

Among the speakers, as far as notes-written-per-sentence-spoken, Liz Keogh was a pretty clear winner by virtue of a stellar lightning talk. Her keynote and the conversation we had afterward, however, is where I picked up these bonus lessons. I had heard of Cynefin before but always had two questions that never seemed to be answered in the descriptions I had read, until this week:

A figure showing the four domains of Cynefin

  1. It’s pronounced like “Kevin” but with an extra “N”
  2. The little hook or squiggle at the bottom of the Cynefin figure you see everywhere is actually meaningful: like a fold in some fabric, it indicates a change in height from the obvious/simple domain in the lower right from which you can fall into the chaotic in the lower left.

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  1. Lisa Crispin

    @ August 14, 2018, 10:52

    Reading what you said about a feeling of cliquishness – eeek, I feel like I was totally guilty of that. I was so excited to see some people I knew from social media, as well as some old friends, I don’t think I did a good enough job of reaching out to people I don’t know. I did make some new friends and have good conversations at Lean Coffee and at our lunchtime risk storming session. It’s so hard when I want to see particular people and make dinner plans with them – not thinking about how I could maybe help other people have a better conference experience by including them. Thank you for mentioning that.

    • Gregory Paciga

      @ August 14, 2018, 19:28

      But totally understandable too! Even though I wasn’t able to take you up on it for various reasons, I appreciated your open dinner invites on slack. Sleeping in and missing Lean Coffee is one thing I’ll try to avoid next time 🙂

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