The Software Test Professionals Conference is quickly coming up Oct 19-21.

Have you registered yet?

If so, I look forward to seeing you there!

If not, what are you waiting for?!

Read on for 5 reasons to attend:

1) You are a Software Test Professional – if so, you need to be there! This conference is all about people like you who want to learn, improve themselves, connect with like-minded people, and grow themselves professionally. If any of these apply to you, sign up now!

• You are a tester, a manager of test teams, a project test lead, a programmer who tests, someone who manages beta testers or usability testers, or someone just interested in increasing the value of testing.
• You spend time improving your skill sets (or want to), and believe that continuous learning and challenging yourself is a necessary part of your job.
• You want to increase the value of testing in your organization.
• You are not interested in being a robot who blindly does what you are told, but finds ways to improve the way you do your own work so you can do your best work possible.  You also encourage this in others, by leading by example.

2) Learn by Doing, Not Listening in the Hands-On Testing Techniques Lab. The best way to learn new skills is to practice them hands-on while you are learning them. Come and challenge yourself with new methods in a safe environment with instructors and other students. This is a rare opportunity at any conference, so be sure to take advantage of the opportunity (and bring your laptop!).

3) Attend My Sessions & Talk With Me! There are many other great presenters to check out as well – but I know you’ll want to attend mine. ?

My pre-conference workshop, Test Management Clinic, will help you explore and learn techniques for solving real-life test management challenges. You may even leave with appropriate solutions to challenges you are currently experiencing. Register ASAP to reserve your seat now!

My session Explore Beyond the Obvious in the Hands-On Testing Techniques Lab will allow you to try different testing approaches to dig deeper into seemingly simple applications, and learn new information about products you test.

The panel I am speaking on about Reducing the Cost of Testing will help you gain ideas in reducing test costs, understand tradeoffs in doing so, and learn how to talk about testing costs with management in a reasoned, articulate manner.

4) Improve Your Career via the multitude of opportunities awaiting you. Network with people who are driving changes in the industry and understand their strategies so you can too. Connect with people around the globe who can help you with some of your challenges, and vice-versa. Learn leadership strategies to champion initiatives and changes in your workplace. Improve your skills in working with management, and making testing a valuable part of the organization.

5) STP Conference is in Las Vegas! Seriously, how much fun will that be? If you ever needed an excuse to get yourself to Vegas, this is it. Imagine – spending days learning to your hearts content and talking with fellow test professionals, then enjoying evenings in the fun of Las Vegas while connecting with fabulous testers from around the globe.

Register Now – The Early Bird Deadline ends this Friday August 20, which provides a $500 savings off the conference package.

See you in Vegas!

Having been a black box software tester for a few years already, I still knew there was a lot I could learn from this course specifically. Hands-on courses with exercises requiring active observation, critical thinking, and collaboration with peers were in short supply back then. I relished the opportunity to challenge myself and to learn, so I was hooked.

Oh, and it was free. That made it easy to get approval from my manager to take the course (ha! Free = no approval necessary!).

Unfortunately, I consistently had obligations that kept me away from the course. Excuses? No. That’s just how it was.  Starting and raising a family while moving up the ranks in responsibility at work took priority.

Fast-forward five years.

The Black-Box Software Testing Foundations course was moved to be offered and taught through the Association for Software Testing. Cem is actively involved with the AST, as are many other bright, active, and thinking testers who do a lot to contribute to, and further, the craft of software testing.The BBST Foundations course is offered for free to all AST members. There are subsequent courses offered as well, with a nominal fee for both members and non-members.

All course material is still available on the Center for Software Testing Education & Research website, so you can take it on your own time, though you won’t benefit from the peer and instructor interactions (which are a BIG piece of the learning throughout the course).

In March I finally found the time to register for the May 2010 offering of the BBST Foundations course, as I had a lighter workload than usual in May. I admit that I was somewhat nervous as I had not actively applied my skills at a “doer” level in quite some time, due to numerous roles at management, project/program management, and other similar, levels.

Without giving away pertinent course details that will require course instructors/designers to have to devise new materials to evaluate student comprehension, I can say that I enjoyed the BBST Foundations course immensely.

Reflections on BBST Foundations

The course was advertised to be about 8 hours of work, per week. While that seemed like a fair amount, I was quite surprised to find myself spending 20-25 hours on course work per week. It was well worth it though.

Highlights of my experiences during the BBST Foundations course include:

• Online course experience. I found this difficult at first, as I prefer to work with people in person to observe body language, and to form bonds. It is more challenging to do via email and forum posts, but possible with a concerted effort. This experience gave me hope for future online learning experiences. The course designers encouraged a lot of peer interaction to promote and facilitate learning, which did wonders for everyone’s learning.

• I met phenomenal testers, both new to the field, and many years experienced; both instructors, and students; located here in Canada, North America, Europe, and Asia. I appreciate the learning I obtained and experienced with all of them.

• I learned, a lot! Having been in the software field for 10 years, I wondered how much I would learn from an introductory black box software testing course. I discovered that there was a lot to learn still. Without providing specific details, I can tell you that whether you are new to testing, a small number of years in, or a decade or more, this course will get you thinking critically, and from different perspectives.

• I still don’t like multiple choice tests. Yes, there are multiple choice quizzes in the course. These are intended to help you think critically while reading text to correctly understand intent and respond with the appropriate answer. Sometimes only small nuances make the difference between a correct and incorrect answer. I have never been very good at multiple choice, and discovered I still am not. That said, the exercises certainly helped me slow down and try to think the through questions using different approaches.

• The assignments were incredibly valuable to explore the concepts of oracles and heuristics. For whatever reason, I have often struggled with the terms ‘oracle’ and ‘heuristic’, despite that I can use them appropriately in context. Regardless, the exercises really nailed home these terms and improved my application of them in practice.

• The exam has a study guide, which is a series of questions that you are able to attempt and discuss with fellow students. What an idea! Imagine: Time to think through questions and improve upon answers based on peer comments before the actual exam. This really helped me better understand the questions and provide more context-appropriate answers.

So, a lot of work?

Absolutely.

Well worth it?

Yes.

I love to learn, and apply learned skills, to add more value to a business (and subsequently), more value to my immediate organization. I found this BBST Foundations course to be challenging, educational, and appropriately balanced in introductory concepts and applications.

I highly recommend the BBST Foundations course to all levels and experiences of software tests (heck, even non-software testers).

Be sure to sign up for upcoming BBST course offerings on the AST website.

.. and hey, I passed the BBST Foundations course! Yay!

It was beneficial as I was able to help employees learn new concepts and improve skills,  in a manner that fit for them.  The added bonus for me was that I learned something new from them as well.  What powerful experiences those were!

Now, as a manager for 18 testers who are spread across several different agile teams, I find it difficult, if not impossible, to coach testing skills one-on-one.  On a weekly basis I also spend time coaching the agile teams, management-level initiatives to improve company-wide practices, and the usual management administration.  Such is life in a ‘start-up’ type of company.  As a result, my one-on-one time with each person is limited to 30-60 minutes over two weeks.  This seems a miniscule amount given they are working a minimum of 80 hours in that same time period!

I am someone who is motivated and energized in working with others to learn new skills, to understand and be able to apply new skills appropriately, and to have those ‘light bulb’ moments where things just click.  Given my work situation, I have been frustrated with how little I have been able to do this.  This left me with a problem!

How can I increase the amount of coaching and teaching time each individual is receiving?

Solutions:

• Forget about it: Nope! I’m too invested in helping others learn and grow.
• Clone myself: Not feasible, as in I don’t know how, and it is kind of icky to think about.
• Shift responsibilities to other people: The possible people to offload to are just as overloaded as me.
• Find additional ways to teach and coach skills so each individual gets more opportunities to learn and improve: There are lots of ways to do this!  I just need to invest some more time to create these opportunities.  Some possibilities:
  • Coach a smaller group, and have them coach small subsets of the larger group.
  • Direct them to other people who I trust will coach them appropriately.
  • Move our 1:1′s to their work space & turn it into a paired testing session.
  • Create workshops where they can learn and practice skills.
  • Coach other people to create workshops where they can learn and practice skills.

What I’m Doing:

Ongoing learning and growth are important to me.  Happily, I discovered that they are important to my department as well.  They requested regularly scheduled workshops/training sessions to be reinstated after being cancelled during the agile training the entire engineering organization went through over the summer.  They missed them!  They missed the learning, new perspectives, and much needed ‘down time’ at work.

So, regular department workshops / training sessions were reinstated on a biweekly basis.  We are currently shifting to make them weekly.

Our first workshop back was a brainstorming session to come up with a list of loosely prioritized workshops the team members would like to have provided.   They came up with a lot of great topics, which we are adding to on an ongoing basis, and are adapting priorities as needed.

The workshops we are doing are typically 2 hours long, and are created by myself or a team member, and contain both teaching of concepts, and time to explore, practice and apply concepts.  We customize workshop focus and content based on the people involved, what they want to learn about, and their current knowledge-base and skill sets.  A blend of ‘teaching’ time and ‘experience’ time are proving vital to help people go back to their day-to-day work and integrate new learnings – which when applied to hands-on work become new-found skills when they invest time in practicing them.

The workshops also allow me to engage with everyone both as a group and individually, and determine how I can add more value for them when we have our regular one-on-one conversations.

Final Thoughts:

I am not yet satisfied with the amount of coaching and teaching I am able to provide to each individual. However, I am happy with the progress I am making in increasing the amount of learning opportunities they are getting from me.  These workshops have allowed me to stretch the limited time I have to teach, coach, and add more value for all of my department members.   This is an improvement, and a step forward to incorporating other learning opportunities for my department.

I plan to share some of the workshop experiences in future blog entries, so keep an eye out for those!

On Teaching Software Testing:

My thoughts on this have been bouncing around in my head for a while – how can we improve on how testing skills are taught?  What is the best way to teach and coach them?

For myself, there are things I am doing now which are helpful, but there is so much more I would like to do, and I’m sure could be doing that I haven’t considered yet.  I know I am not the only person in that position.  So where do we begin?

Matthew Heusser recently blogged on this very topic.  He invited people to comment on what types of teaching and training are wanted by organizations for their employees, and what would be most effective for the employees.   I added my comments to that entry, alongside some brilliant thinkers in this field.  Thank you to Matt for starting a great conversation thread!  You can read it at http://blogs.stpcollaborative.com/matt/2009/11/18/you-say-you-want-a-revolution/.

Your turn!

What are your experiences and thoughts on how to coach and teach software testing skills?  As a coach/teacher/trainer, what have you done to do this when you have had little time to do it well?  As a tester, how do you want to be coached and taught – what would be most effective for you?

I welcome your comments, and encourage you to share them both here and on Matthew’s blog.