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On March 11th 2014, we’re opening the doors to the first ever Tasting Let’s Test Netherlands! Tasting Let’s Test are a 1-day events, designed to give you a bite-sized taste of what the Let’s Test spirit is all about.

The event will take place at De Fabrique in Utrecht, Netherlands. The full day program is available here.

We’re offering the full event at the low rate of €199 (Euro). You can register by following this link.

Keynotes

Getting Serious About Emotions in Testing – Michael Bolton

Software testing is a highly technical, mathematical, rational business. There’s no place for the squishy emotional stuff here. Or is there?

Because of ambition and risk, emotions can run high in software development and testing groups. It can be easy to become frustrated, confused, or bored; angry, impatient, or overwhelmed. Yet if we choose to remain aware of them and open to them, feelings are immediate and powerful sources of information for testers, alerting us to problems in the product and in our approaches to our work, and how we might change things. People don’t decide things based on numbers; they decide based on how they feel about the numbers. Our ideas about quality and bugs are rooted in our desires, which in turn are rooted in feelings.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry… and you may be surprised as Michael Bolton shows the important role that feelings play in excellent testing, and how you can take advantage of the information they provide.

Michael Bolton is a software tester, consultant, and trainer with 20 years of experience around the world, testing, developing, managing, and writing about software. He is the co-author (with senior author James Bach) of Rapid Software Testing, a course that presents a methodology and mindset for testing software expertly in uncertain conditions and under extreme time pressure.

For Those About To Rock – Henrik Andersson

Let´s have a look at Let´s Test. What is all the fuzz about and what makes Let´s Test rock? In this talk i will give you our thoughts, vision and dreams when creating Let´s Test. What have you experienced during todays tasting and what is there left to experience at the full fledged conference. I will talk about what we are doing to help our community get stronger and sharper. Let´s Test is “for testers by testers” but what does that really mean?

Henrik Andersson is Co-founder and CEO of House of Test Consulting. Besides House of Test, Henrik also co-founded Let´s Test, Europe´s first annual conference on context driven testing. The conference has set a new bar for testing conferences around the world. 2013 has was a busy year; Henrik founded the local user group ConTest in Malmö, Sweden, supported the Let’s Test expansion to Australia and co-founded the International Society For Software Testing (ISST). ConTest is taking the concept of facilitated peer conferences to a broader local community and the ISST was founded with the mission to put back common sense back into testing by advocacy, development of testing skills and growing our community.

Sessions

What testers can learn from the social sciences – Huib Schoots

Testing and informatics are often seen as exact or physical science. People perceive that computers always do exactly the same. This gets reflected in the way they think about testing: a bunch of repeatable steps to see if the requirements are met, but is that really what testing is all about? I like to think of testing more as a social science. Testing is not only about technical computer stuff, it is also about human aspects and social interaction. IT is often considered as a technical science or engineering. Traditionally testers are techies who focus on analysing requirements and turning them into a series of test cases. Some also analyse product risks and write (master) test plans. Focus is on technical and analytical skills. But testing requires a lot more! Testing is about attitude, skills, communication, behaviour, collaboration and (critical and/or systems) thinking.

The seven basic principles of the Context-Driven School tell us that people, working together, are the most important part of any project’s context. That good software testing is a challenging intellectual process. And that only through judgement and skill, exercised cooperatively throughout the entire project, are we able to do the right things at the right times to effectively test our products. In these principles there is a lot of non-technical stuff that has a major influence in my work as a tester.

This talk gives insight in why testing is a social science. It also gives some examples of what a tester can take away from social sciences. Anthropology teaches us about how people live, interact, something about culture. Education/didactic helps acquire new or modifying existing knowledge, behaviours, skills, values, or preferences. Sociology teaches us empirical investigation and critical analysis and gives insight in human social activity. Psychology is the study of the mind and behaviour and helps testers understand individuals and groups. Philosophy is interesting, because, as James Bach once wrote in Philosophers of Testing – James Bach: “As I periodically remind my readers and clients, I am a context-driven tester. That requires me to examine the relationship between my practices and the context in which I should use those practices. I don’t know how anyone could be truly context-driven without also being comfortable with philosophy.

Huib Schoots is agile test consultant at codecentric where he shares his passion for testing through coaching, training, and giving presentations on a variety of test subjects. With almost 20 years of experience in IT and software testing, Huib is experienced in different testing roles. Curious and passionate, he is an agile and context-driven tester who attempts to read everything ever published on software testing. A member of the Dutch Exploratory Workshop on Testing, black-belt in the Miagi-Do School of software testing and co-author of a book about the future of software testing, Huib maintains a blog on magnifiant.com and can be found on twitter: @huibschoots

Drawing to Learn – Sketching For Testers – Ruud Cox

As we as testers test a product, we build mental models of the product. We do this by investigating and evaluating the product from different perspectives. But mental models are volatile, not very reliable and often don’t fit in our minds. That’s why we document these mental models in order to prevent them from being lost or to use them as a basis for discussions or for further investigation.

There is a common notion that information is best represented by text and maybe some diagrams. These text documents are written at the beginning of a project or at the beginning of a phase but they are almost never used after that during a project. What if we would start mapping our mental models into visual models and use these models while we test the product at hand? Wouldn’t it be more effective if visual modeling was an integrated part of the learning cycle that testing is?

In our daily work as testers we use all kinds of automation tools to support our testing efforts. Among them are many visualisation tools. But scientific studies show that sketching with a simple combination of pencil and paper might lead to better results.

The purpose of this presentation is to explain the power of drawing and how it benefits the iterative testing process. Examples from a real project will be used during this presentation to illustrate the points being made.

Key learning points: ­

* What is drawing and sketching? ­

* The power of visualization ­

* How drawings can make the learning cycle more effective.

Ruud Cox is a test consultant with extensive experience in the embedded systems industry. In the first part of his professional career he worked, with much enthusiasm, as a software developer. In 2001 he discovered his real passion; software testing. He considers himself a context-driven tester who considers the testing profession a tour in which relevant subjects must be studied and practiced in order to become a better tester. He worked for companies in various domains such as consumer electronics, semiconductors, lighting and healthcare. He currently works for Improve Quality Services, a provider of consultancy and training in the field of testing. To share his ideas, knowledge and experiences, he publishes on his blog and tweets as @ruudcox.

Artful Testing – Zeger Van Hese

Art and testing may look like an odd couple. True, Glenford Myers combined both in his book “The Art of Software Testing”, but the art in there was strictly limited to the title page, since the term isn’t even mentioned once throughout the whole book. It referred to skill and mastery, of course, not to an aesthetic experience. More recently, Robert Austin and Lee Devin published “Artful making” which mainly addressed software development and its resemblance to art. This got me thinking: what about artful testing?

In this presentation I investigate what happens when we infuse testing with aesthetics. Can the fine arts in any way support or complement our testing efforts? With some surprising examples, I illustrate that I think they can.

The tools used by art critics, for instance, can be a valuable addition to our tester toolbox. They enable us to become software critics, engaging in demystification and deconstruction. Testers can also benefit from studying art and looking at it. After all, this largely resembles what we do when we are testing: thoughtfully looking at software. Art carries the risk of being mistaken for superficial “look and see”, as does testing: we look; we see what’s there – or we believe we do. But looking at something in ways that make sense of it calls for much more than that. It appeals to our experiential and reflective intelligence. Art feeds and stimulates the tester’s hungry eye.

As we are overloaded with greater amounts of information than ever before, our ability to find meaning in things surrounding us involves a complex set of thinking skills. Naming what we see is one of them. Analyzing context based on personal association and perspective, cultural knowledge, interpretation, evidence, imagination, exploration and risk is another. These questioning and reasoning strategies used in evaluating art can be applied in testing too. This is where testing and art can meet. Good testing should be artful, in so many ways.

Zeger Van Hese (born and raised in Belgium) has a background in Commercial Engineering and Cultural Science. He started his professional career in the movie distribution industry but switched to IT in 1999. A year later he got bitten by the software testing bug (pun intended) and has never been cured since. Over the years, he developed a passion for exploratory testing, testing in agile projects and, above all, continuous learning from different perspectives. He was the 2012 Eurostar program chair and recently founded his own company, Z-sharp, dedicated to help clients on the path to smarter testing. He is co-founder of the Dutch Exploratory Workshop on Testing (DEWT), founding member of the ISST, muses about testing on his TestSideStory blog and is a regular speaker at conferences worldwide. Contact Zeger at zeger@z-sharp.be

Embracing Exploratory Testing – Carsten Feilberg

Despite ET is not at all new, there are still many myths and misunderstandings about it, like: it’s a black box testing technique, it’s something magical done by testers after they executed the real tests, it’s not structured and a few more. We will not investigate why some people have gotten such a wrong idea of what Exploratory Testing is, but we will try to set the record straight about how Exploratory Testing is in fact very structured, disciplined, accountable and much more real testing than anything else. Furthermore we will take a look at tools and methods to help you guide it, manage it and report from it.

We will in particular take a look at some popular heuristics, techniques for note taking and get our heads around the low-tech dashboard and SBTM/MTBS.

After this “crash-course” you can give it all a try in the test lab exercise: Practice Exploratory Testing.

Carsten Feilberg has been testing and managing testing for more than a decade working on various projects covering the fields of insurance, pensions, public administration, retail and other back office systems as well as a couple of websites. With more than 18 years as a consultant in IT his experience ranges from one-person do-it-all projects to being delivery and test manager on a 70+ system migration project involving almost 100 persons. He is also a well known blogger and presenter on conferences and a strong advocate for context-driven testing. He is living and working in Denmark as a consultant at House of Test.

The Test Lab – Pascal Dufour & Ray Oei

Bring your laptop!

The Test Lab is the place to explore, test, play, learn, meet, confer, have fun and make friends… Many participants at conferences are interested to know what YOU can do as a tester. By sharing experiences, techniques and test ideas with those next to you in the Testlab, you can learn so much more. Speakers are urged to illustrate their talk, to show how it can be applied in practise. Everyone are welcome to join the Testlab. Continue to build your reputation as a tester and do that in the testlab!

The Test Lab gives attendees the opportunity to test real systems with various kits and tools, in a live, practical environment. It’s an interactive place, providing direct hands-on experience for attendees to put their testing skills into practice.

The Lab sees live testing, games, competitions, expert sessions and is a really fun place to hang out, meet new friends and learn something new outside of the conventional classroom setting.

Pascal Dufour is a passionate tester and Scrum Master at codecentric. Pascal has a passion for agile projects where he tries to implement pragmatic test strategies combining agile and context-driven testing. With over ten years of experience at large international companies, Pascal has experience with different types of testing from embedded software to system integration. Enthusiastic and creative, he tries to make testing more fun, making his work visual and as simple as possible. He helps team members improve their efforts in Scrum emphasizing ethics, commitment, and transparency. Motivating people to use a dynamic approach to testing. He believes teams should contain all disciplines and work together to create solutions that solve problems. Pascal maintains a blog on pascaldufour.nl.

Born and bred in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Ray Oei started out as a Physical Chemistry major in the mid-80′s, where he got interested in the art of Molecular Dynamics. He did research on the behavior of fluids with simulations on supercomputers. To the end of his study he started working in a little IT company. Where he did the design, programming and project management of PBX software for companies like AT&T, Ericsson and Philips. Testing was still in its infancy back then… and he was also responsible for that. So he learned the hard way.

Nowadays he is called a “test consultant”, he is a coach and trainer. He is still a geek in nature and loves technical stuff and areas like performance testing. But also the psychology of man and the influence that has on the craft of testing has his interest.

Ray is a (lead) instructor with the Association for Software Testing for the different BBST courses. He has a blog (but is not a very active writer), tries to maintain the DEWT blog and can sometimes be found on twitter: @rayoei.

Practice Exploratory Testing – Carsten Feilberg

This session is a laboratory exercise where the participants will practice Exploratory Testing using heuristics, competing on note-taking and collecting information. With the outset in the presentation Embracing Exploratory Testing the participants will do a 30 minute testing exercise followed by a debrief / open season for questions, to wrap up our learnings.

Carsten Feilberg has been testing and managing testing for more than a decade working on various projects covering the fields of insurance, pensions, public administration, retail and other back office systems as well as a couple of websites. With more than 18 years as a consultant in IT his experience ranges from one-person do-it-all projects to being delivery and test manager on a 70+ system migration project involving almost 100 persons. He is also a well known blogger and presenter on conferences and a strong advocate for context-driven testing. He is living and working in Denmark as a consultant at House of Test.

Facilitation – Peter Schrijver

All Q&A (or Open Season) after the talks will be facilitated. Facilitation is key as the Q&A is hopefully highly interactive. Discussions are often engaging and can be intense. Intense discussions are permitted as long as they remain professional and relate to the presented material, not the presenter. The facilitator manages the discussion and presentation questions. The facilitation allows for diverse conversation on the topic and ensuring everyone has an opportunity to speak.

Open Season Discussion

The facilitated discussion is also called “Open Season” and uses the coloured index cards provided to each attendee.

Green: The New Stack card signals the facilitator that you have a question or comment unrelated to the current discussion thread.

Yellow: The On Stack card signals the facilitator that you have a question or comment that relates to the current thread of discussion

Red: The Burning Issue card is only to be used when you are urgently compelled to interrupt a speaker. It can be a point-of-order, an argument, a problem with facility acoustics, or something you need to say quickly because you have been provoked in a meaningful way. If you use your red card, the facilitator may confiscate it for the remainder of the conference – so use it wisely.

Blue: The Off Track card is only to be used when a participant feels the discussion has gone off track and needs to be brought back to the original discussion thread.

More information on facilitation and k-cards can be found here: http://testingthoughts.com/blog/26

Peter is a very experienced all-round tester, who has worked since 1997 as tester, test coordinator and test manager. He has several years of experience using SBTM as a test approach. Since 2005, Peter works as an independent consultant. He visits annually at least two conferences and two training sessions to keep his knowledge up to date and where necessary, broaden/deepen his knowledge. Peter is also an active member of TestNet and (co-founder) of the Dutch Exploratory Workshop on Testing. In these communities of enthusiastic testers he is active with peers and discuss with them on the testing profession to keep up to date and improve themselves. Peter is a very experienced facilitator.