Testing Garage: My Learning from Agile Testing Alliance's 12th Bengaluru Meetup

I attended Agile Testing Alliance's 12th Bengaluru Meetup hosted at Moolya Software Testing Pvt. Ltd., office on 25th March 2017. I got to know about this meetup from the Facebook share by Moolya and made my mind to be there. The audience in the meetup were software testers, Agile trainer or coach, and technical lead.

Below listed presentation came in time between 9:40 am IST to 12:50 pm IST

Welcome and introduction to Agile Testing Alliance, by Nishi Grover Garg
Challenges of Agile for a Manger, by Preeth Pandalay, Techno Agilist, Agile Coach & Trainer
Behavior Driven Development: What, Why & How - from a tester's perspective, by Vinay Krishna, Agile Technology Coach
Problem Solving Techniques: An attempt to apply ideas across disciplines, by Ajay Balamurugadas, Tyto Software
Creating 100 mindmaps in 1 minute, a demo by, Dharamalingam K, Moolya Software Testing Pvt. Ltd
Concluding the meetup and vote of thanks, by Nishi Grover Garag

Brief lines on presentations from my notes

I'm listing few points here out of my notes. It was engaging sessions and I had to make sure that I will listen, I make notes and tweet to people if any who were curious to know what's happening in the meetup.

Nishi Grover Garg : Introduction to ATA and welcome note

She introduced herself and shared about the Agile Testing Alliance and what it does
Said about the recent testing conference that was held i.e. GTR Pune 2017
Shared about the different certifications and the assistance from ATA

Preeth Pandalay : Challenges of Agile for a Manager

Started with management structure, management hierarchy and bureaucracy
Spoke about management in 21st century and in technology era
Shared his views on traditional structure of management and Agile management structure
From there, he spoke about traditional manager and Agile manager
Mentioned about the network based management and said it as organization structure 2.0
Then he said about Agile Team Cross Functional and mentioned Katrina Clokie's blog which speaks about this
With that he said, Agile team is self organized
He shared statistics of Agile helping to solve and deliver better
With the statistics walk through, he says, Agile works
Audience had question around -- "Management yet to getting adapted to Agile and teams are on Agile. How to solve this so team gets much more support?"

Vinay Krishna : BDD -- What, Why, How - a tester's perspective

Started by asking do you know what is BDD and then said it is another buzz word and jargon
Says, "in this era we all are programmers and need to write code; testing is a specialization now."
He said about the surprises that software development brings and highlighted on "assumptions" what people make in team
Started a group activity saying to draw start having 12 points and later he asked "why you did not ask questions but assumed?"
Says, bug + feature = beature

misunderstanding at all levels
lack of effective communication
difficulty in communication
lots of assumptions

Then he shared, BDD = shared understanding by discussing examples
Continuing his talk, he said, for start have at least three amigos -- Business Analyst, Programmer and Tester
Also says, it is useful if identified and used more than three amigos
Shared about how important a scenario and use of Gherkins
Mentioned on BDD framework saying,

Feature File
Step defintion (glue code)
Actual implementation

Started another group activity and asked to identify the scenarios for a ATM transaction
He said to avoid UI tests with BDD
Shared few myths around BDD

BDD is automation of functional testing
Using Cucumber is BDD
BDD is replacement of functional testing

Took questions from audience around

Difference between unit testing and BDD
Around usefulness on BDD
Deriving the benefits of BDD in performance and security testing
Limitations of BDD

Ajay Balamurugadas : Problem Solving Techniques: An attempt to apply ideas across disciplines

Starts by asking, "How do you solve problem? Take a minute and let me know."

Audience started interacting
There were no slide and it was a white board and interactive session througout

Then he mentioned about a crisp definition for "what is problem?" of Jerry Weinberg

difference between expectation and reality

He mentioned about Problem Solving Leadership workshop by Jerry Weinberg
He says, "focus on things which can be controlled"
From here, he asked the audience to pick any one problem, so that he demonstrates how to solve it

The audience picked -- why less number of attendees to the meetup
He started to brainstorm around this problem while audience interactively shared their thoughts on how to solve it
Nishi Grover Garg, said this is useful and it will be used from the next upcoming meetup

Moving from here, he said about four techniques which can be used in solving the problem

Attributes and Improvement

by, Robert P Crawford
Further with examples he said

identify the problem and list out the attributes of the problem
work on the improvement of the problem
If you miss out an imporant attribute, problem might not be solved

Six Thinking Hats

by, Edwared de Bono

Mentioned about 6 different thinking hats -- White, Black, Yellow, Green, Blue and Red
Briefed what each hats means and what they signify
He recommended to avoid using Black hat immediately after the use of Green hat

Questioning

He said the importance of questioning
Mentioned about Osborn Questioning

SCAMPER

A mnemonic

S - substitute
C - combine
A - adapt
M - magnify
P - put
E - eliminate
R - rearrange, reverse

Later he shared one more mnemonic which he made while on the way to meetup

PROBLEM

P - perception
R - reasoning
O - opportunity
B - beware of assumptions & problems caused by solving the problems
L - lawfulness
E - exploratory
M - management

He took the questions from audience on the techniques and applying it

Dharamalingam K : Creating 100 mindmaps in 1 minute, a demo

Walked through swiftly on what is Mindmap and where it can be used
He shared about the problem what he and his team encountered when wanting to build a mindmap for a product's feature
Then, he said how he built the mindmap via Python program
He ran a quick demo which showed creation of mindmaps
He took the questions from audience

On mindmap
On the complexity and how to do this via programming

Nishi Grover Garg : Concluding the meetup and vote of thanks

She thanked the audience who made for the meetup
Said about the Agile Testing Alliance and benefits the people can get from ceritification

I took below to my desk from this meetup

How to handle myself in teams which claims to run on Agile
How to coordinate and deliver my best in the environment which claims to run on Agile
How to focus on my work irrespective of Agile or not Agile and assist fellow testers and stakeholders
Thoughts and questions around BDD apart from functional testing

A mind which says to explore on this

To focus on things which is in my control and where I can deliver

Do not take responsibility without having the authority

I repeated this to myself again

To read and build skills from below resources shared by Ajay

Attributes and Improve, by Robert P Crawford
Game Storming, by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, James Macanufo
To explore and use what I can to learn in the web -- http://humansystemsinaction.com

Post meetup hours, was part of three interactive discussing sessions with Ajay and Pranav. I did learn discussing to Ajay and Pranav on fundamental topics of software testing, programming and practice.

Here is a pic from the meetup