Less than 2 years ago people were talking about the transition from onsite to remote, in this blog I’ll mention the opposite sens and how great is getting back to normal life “post pandemic” !
I’ll describe my participation to the JFTL on its 13th edition, known as the biggest french testing conference. It’s hold in Paris where participants come from all over france.
In this blog you will find my takeways and at the end a funny story how I made the trip possible by doing some exploratory testing in real life 🙂
By the same occasion, excited that I got the chance to meet my colleagues at Sogeti France, and happy to announce my new coming adventure with them starting in few days !!
Takeaways from Keynotes
Keynote #1 – Yves Caseau – DSI Michelin – L’approche lean et les tests dans la transformation digitale
The first Keynote talked about the lean approach and tests in the era of digital transformation
Where he mentioned 3 main parts
- Part1: ⚡ Lean Digital Transformation ⚡
Nowdays digital change is pushed from customer and technology side, and everyone want to deliver the best experience.
He started this part saying that “markets are conversations” which means that in this world full of abundance you must listen carefully to what the customer is looking for. Sharing a conversation with him requires a content strategy.
He also mentioned continuous discovery of the product, and how the collect of feedback as early as possible is good and better than collecting it the earliest possible. Think about it as an MVP.
Funny how he said that software is eating the world !
“if the pipeline is not working well, run it more frequently and highlight the difficulties” Jezz Humble
We have to change to way of adapting to change to deliver more value, using customer centric approach, the code is co-developed with the client : “From customer to code, from code to customer”
- Part2: ⚡Lean Software Factories ⚡
Automation & excellence to deliver change and quality
➡️ lean & agile
➡️ lean thinking
➡️ lean practices
➡️ product mode
Bringing people together with different perspectives can improve problem solving and lead to smarter, more sustainable decision making, it’s about cross functional teams working together with a focus on software excellence: testing as early as possible.
➡️ CI/CD pipeline
- Test as early as possible so that the integration debt won’t grow.
- Automation to reduce takt time and improve quality “if the pipeline is not working well, run it more frequently and highlight the difficulties” Jezz Humble
- Part3: ⚡Software Craftsmanship and Tests ⚡
In this part he mentioned the term “embedded agility” which means that agility is not about postit but we want the software need to be adaptable.
3 main takeaways:
➡️ Show and share the code: develop and value software excellence through peer reviews
➡️ Make code reviews more pleasurable and more efficient
➡️ “Love your code”: code elegance as a support for business agility, make the code elegant and easy to maintain
He also mentioned Lean Software Standards
➡️ Five S [Sort: reduce code base, Systemize: organize, code standards, Shine: pass quality tests, clean up, code reviews, improve test coverage rates, Standarize: continiously improve the teams standards, Sustain: make software excellence a habit]
➡️ TDD [test driven development: write unit test first, relate tests to user stories, treat unit tests with same care as source code]
➡️ Visual Management [Voice of customer: always on display for developers, System engineering “see how the systems works”, kanban limit WIP]
And I’ll let the tweet of Anne makes the conclusion for you !
Keynote #2 – Kari Kakkonen ISTQB Finland – Why children should learn to test – why anyone should test?
The second one was one of the funniest why children should learn to test or even anyone else test ! I also got the chance to get his book Dragons OUT!
My Presentation about Testing Beyond your Project
As the name indicate it’s not about doing regular testing inside the project, it’s about seeing around new ideas that the tester can have to develop the tester mindset in him.
In agile world we talk about continuous testing and being able to adapt to change, in my talk my focus was how to get inspired by different things around us even if it’s not directly related to testing and how we can adapt it to our context as testers like the power of Creative thinking, contunious learning, visualization, communities of practice …
I mentioned different games that you can use to learn about testing even with people having different background, and the takeways to improve your testing using those games.
More interesting talks
You can find all the Slides of JFTL conferences in their website www.cftl.fr
Others that I got the chance to attend:
- Quelle évolution pour le testeur dans un monde en mouvement ?
Jean-François Fresi and Yves RICHARD talked about the evolution of the tester in this fast changing world.
⚡automation
⚡agility
⚡devops
⚡softskills
⚡software craftsmanship
⚡scaling
➡️ Emergence of two roles = (Technical, automation) + (QE / Coach test / Facilitator) to facilitate continuous testing
Indeed both are important to live in this fast moving world and adapt to the challenges !
- Des Legos pour les rassembler tous…
Marc Soune-Seyne shared his experience how he used his skills being a trainer, tester and gamer to facilitate workshops using legos to brainstorm and learn about testing ! Interesting approach that I truly appreciate and it’s totally related to my favorite topic gamification in learning which make the choice of which topic to attend easy.
Conference are about community friends
I got the chance to meet community friends Benjamin, Antoine, Estelle, Thomas ..,
I also meet my new colleagues at Sogeti including Dimitri, Florine and many other community folks first time in person but we know each others since years via the virtual space !
New cool items I collected
My favorite new item, is the testing game card called “Agility Maturity Cards” It’s a good way to evaluate how agile is your organisation, I’ll soon explore it and make a racket about it !
Funny facts to make my trip possible
Making this conference possible was not an easy process, you all know that traveling during the pandemic from continent to another is not that easy, what about taking a new visa procedure?
For that I did some exploratory testing by hacking the visa process:
- I changed the order of steps instead of waiting the regular process, and I’m lucky to see both steps meet ontime without any rejection 🙂
- I also took my covid vaccine with students going to study abroad to have my sanity pass ontime to the conference
- Converting my sanity pass to an European pass was not trivial (Hello last minute, I love you). I waited for 2 weeks with no result, I got also rejection, then I combined the steps and I find a way to get it “Passed”
- Another funny fact, having the visa the last minute doesn’t mean you can find a flight to where you want, a travel agency helped me tracking the already FULL flight and suddenly a place is cancelled by someone, so I took the last place in that flight.
Can’t ignore that it was extremely stressful to be in such situation where you don’t know if it will works or not, I did all that because I really wanted to be part of the conference and I’m very happy as it’s the very first after being remote for ages ! The vibes of onsite-conferences are absolutely unique !!
Coming Soon … #AgileTD
See you soon at the BIGGEST Testing Conference AGILE TESTING DAYS in Germany next november, where I’ll be speaking with Ard Kramer about our journey “21st century skills for a tester”, the results and your tips. See U there a talk and workshop are planned !
Emna Ayadi 