I’m a big fan of ministry of testing, and I organize MoT meetups within my SfaxTesting community but I’ve never got the opportunity to attend to their famous testbash conferences around the world! During the covid-19, most of 2020 worldwide conferences are cancelled, but Ministry of Testing team decided to make something different that I’m going to talk about in details.
The Event Magic Recipe
Instead of just cancelling, MOT Team collected most insightful talks from speakers around the world and they made an amazing online conference! It’s Test Bash Home gathering people from all the world corners with more than 1000 participants!
Ingredient 1: Time Zone Challenge Accepted
Being a +24 hours event with no stop where lots of people took this challenge is the one of the ingredients that make this event super unique! Also it’s super fair to enable people from all continents to join at their own time zone without missing the awesomeness that this event brings.
Ingredient 2: The Choice of Event Hosts
This event couldn’t have the same color without all those special hosts Vernon, Tristan, James, Bart, Jenna & Gwen taking four hour chunks of time to make 6 super dynamic sessions with lots of fun and stories in the community space where every participant can be involved easily via online chat or questions to the speaker..!
Ingredient 3: Diversity of Topics and Speakers
This receipe couldn’t be cooked without the main ingredient package which is the diversity of speakers and their different talks from technical to management, from psychological safety to quality, also the special pannel of leadership coaching and fruitful real time discussions, funny puzzels, bug hunts …
Ingredient 4: Targeted Polls
During each session, there are 2 or 3 question that all attendees can vote for with them they feel more engaged and not missed like from which continent you are, what is your favorite activity after testbash, …
Ingredient 5: 99 Second Talks (Participants Outputs)
More spicy ingredients that added more energy, motivation and built stronger connections between the whole MOT team, hosts, speakers and all 1000 participants is the amazing 99 second talks where everyone is free to share any thing in front of others.
They can talk about anything they want to share, even the relation between mushrooms and acceptance testing as Gwen and Jenny mentionned.
Ingredient 6: 99 Second Talks (Bosses Interviews)
Plus the ones from participants planned during some times slots of the conference, there was a continuous special 99 second talks from all the bosses of MOT displayed during as icebreakers between sessions where they’ve been asked about special personal details about them and their story with MoT.
1) Introduce yourself and your position within MoT
2) What’s your favourite hobby/pastime?
3) Favourite film?
4) The most adventurous thing you’ve done?
5) Favourite place visited?
6) What’s your daily routine?
7) How did you discover MoT?
8) Best gig you’ve been to?
Indeed, this is an opportunity to know them better and it creates more fun and energy!
Ingredient 7: More Learning Via the Club
Having such a record of participants +1000 means that tons of questions could be asked for speakers session but if they answer all of them live imagine a probability of having a response that takes 99 seconds to 1000 questions = 99000 sec = 27,5 hours which is impossible. That’s why sessions are timeboxed and the club is always open for new questions or unanswered questions.
My Event Experience
About my 99 second talk: 21st century skills for testers
Unlike other conferences, what make this conference more special, is this pannel of 99 second talks!
I decided to woke up early although I slept too late just because I wanted to be involved in this new experience! It was on 1st May around 7:00 AM.
I talked about the 4C’s for testers which are very important in our today world as testers: Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Communication and Creativity and they are considered as the 21st century skills I mentionned also that gamification is important to develop those skills in the working place if you are interested to discuss and share more insights about this topic reach me out on twitter @emna__ayadi.
Conclusion
However, I tried to highlight most important things but words only can’t tell how incredible is this 24H- online conference.
Don’t forget to go to social media and search for the hashtag #testbash to see different threads of all participants there.
I invite all of you to join future international testing conferences.
Finally, I want to mention that Benjamin Butel and me, got the idea to blog about this conference and our takeaways, he asked me to write a french blog in the testing french community (as both of us belong to the list of authors and we attended to this event) then we discussed about the content and the plan of the blog. We end up with both french and english version of interviews from us and different participants regarding the conference that will be available in part 2. Stay tuned https://emnaayadi.wordpress.com/ for next parts.
Emna Ayadi 
Thanks for mention !
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