Events
Upcoming and previous dates are listed below with links to the slides. References are included on a final slide which isn’t covered at the event.
Moving Cheese: The Art of Persuasion for Testers
Dates
| Event | Date | |
|---|---|---|
| CTM: Continuous Testing Meetup London | 22/03/2023 | Slides, Recording |
| Nordic Testing Days 2023 | 09/06/2023 | |
| EuroSTAR 2023 Antwerp | 14/06/2023 | |
| TestBash UK 2023 Liverpool | 21/09/2023 |
Details
Picture the scene. You are sitting in a testing conference – TestBash UK perhaps. You have heard a brilliant talk – enthusiastic, engaging, and, more importantly, an idea you can use. But you are concerned. You ask a question.
“Thank you, speaker, for an excellent talk. My question: How can I convince my team to do this?”
The answer leaves you wanting more. Isn’t the art of persuading your team of this brilliant idea worth more than a couple of minutes? You are not alone. It is a common and sometimes frustrating experience. In this talk, I don’t want to discuss a new testing technique or a flash new technology. Instead, I want to focus on people. The people who will not be at the conference. The people who you work with every day. How can I help you convince them of all the new ideas you are bursting to try after an exciting conference? How can you bring the magic back with you? Both as a tester and a consultant, I have spent countless hours introducing and managing change. Helping teams feel safe about taking risks and trying new ideas. Based on my experience with teams and clients, I want to help you:
- Recognize that persuasion is rooted in understanding people and their motivations.
- Understand why resistance to change is so common and how it can become less scary.
- Develop your own style of persuasion based on foundational principles.
- Have the confidence to sometimes bend the rules a little to show the potential of your idea.
Testers have the opportunity to lift their teams through new ideas. But often, we are not let down by our idea, motivation or ability. Persuading others is our downfall. So we don’t talk about it. Let us change that. Attend this session and start the conversation about how we as a community can influence others. Combine that with your great idea, and I believe you will be unstoppable.
Under Pressure! Performance Testing APIs with K6
Dates
| Event | Date | |
|---|---|---|
| Nordic Testing Days 2023 | 08/06/2023 |
Details
Ping! Your phone has an alert - an escalation from support. Website performance has deteriorated, sessions are dropping, and it is late in the evening. So open your laptop and grab a drink. It will be a long night of performance debugging and issue fixing.
I don’t want you to have this experience.
Performance testing, in my experience, is a skill many testers don’t often get to explore and develop. The result? Reactive support escalations at inconvenient times filled with stress. But we can change that. Join me in this hands-on workshop based on my experience testing performance for clients with load-intensive applications. We will dive deep into performance testing using K6 and JavaScript. You will learn:
- The business case of why performance is so vital to organisations. The cost in user retention and revenue.
- Models such as RAIL and the Golden Signals, these models help you better understand performance requirements.
- Write K6 tests using JavaScript against APIs inspired by issues discovered with my clients.
- Better interpret the results of performance tests to have real actionable insights you can share with your team.
By our working together you will gain confidence in performance testing APIs. A confidence which will help you discover performance issues early. Being proactive addressing them before production incidents occur. More importantly protecting your evening and avoiding that support call.
Creating Test Strategies Teams Will Read
Dates
| Event | Date | |
|---|---|---|
| Ministry of Testing | 21/09/2021 | Slides |
Details
Test Strategy is an overloaded term. Some fear multiple pages of formal documents that no one will read. Others want every detail documented formally and tightly version controlled. What is best? More importantly, what is best for your project? The context is the key.
This session dives into the detail of test strategies. Discussing what works well for different project contexts, common strategy types, and how to get your team to read it.
Outcomes
- Appreciate the importance of a test strategy.
- Understand what type of strategy style is best for a project.
- Increase team engagement with a test strategy.
Ready for Test - a Symptom of a Poor Quality Culture
Dates
| Event | Date | |
|---|---|---|
| CTM: Continuous Testing Meetup London | 30/06/2021 | Slides, Recording |
| 2nd. Test Busters Day & Night | 09/09/2021 | Slides |
| Nordic Testing Days 2022 | 03/06/2021 | Slides, Recording |
| EuroSTAR 2022 Copenhagen | 10/06/2022 |
Details
The Ready for Test column on our boards feels safe, doesn’t it? A well-known column with a clear purpose, at least that is how it might seem. But what if this column is doing more harm than good in your team?
Ideas such as Shift Left and Continuous Integration are increasingly popular. This popularity stems from early feedback, sharing knowledge and ownership between team members. Yet Agile software teams continue to treat QA concerns as a separate stage owned by different people. QA team members provide feedback after the task, hoarding knowledge and being passed the ownership of quality.
In this talk, I want to convince you that in many cases, Ready for Test, In QA and other quality gate columns do more harm than good. They contribute to a culture of separation between QAs and other team members. This separation causes quality to decrease. There is a better way.
Verifying Relationships: Consumer-Driven Contract Tests and Microservices
Dates
| Event | Date | |
|---|---|---|
| London Tester Gathering | 25/02/2020 | Slides |
| Ministry of Testing Buckinghamshire | 06/08/2020 | Slides, Recording |
| TAQfull | 13/08/2020 | Slides, Recording |
| CTM: Continuous Testing Meetup London | 20/08/2020 | Slides, Recording |
| Nordic Testing Days 2021 | 04/06/2021 | |
| SauceCon 2022 | 06/05/2022 | Recording |
Details
Microservice architecture brings many benefits but there is one potential pitfall when testing them. How do you model and test the many relationships between services? You could try integration tests but they are expensive to maintain, slow to run and come with orchestration complications.
Contract testing could help with this. But the traditional contract test has a circular problem. The team writing the service defines the contract and the test. As soon as this isn’t kept up to date (only a matter of time) the test is useless.
A better approach is Consumer-Driven Contract testing. Here we use the output of contract tests owned by your consumers to test your API. This talk will introduce you to the Pact framework to write these tests and the key concepts. You will be able to avoid that integration test pack and have more time for other test activities in your team.
