How do you maintain motivation ? How do you break daily routine ? How can you make your work not boring and more challenging ? …. ?
I receive lots of similar questions from colleagues and friends around me, and I wanted to share with you one of the answers which is “Go to conferences” or even better “Challenge yourself to speak at conferences”.

and Agile Testing Days is on top of them to stay motivated, become more passionate about testing, learn from world experts, network, and also feel challenged to deliver a talk or facilitate a workshop.

Coming back from #AgileTD 2022 with fresh ideas and new learnings and lot of motivation ! it’s my second time attending and seaking at this awesome conference !

In this blog post I’ll share with you some of my sketchnotes that I was able to draw in real time,

Happiness is Quality by Gwen Diagram

Any dramatic Elephants 🐘 in the Room ? by Martijn Nas

He started his keynote with an elephant‼️, yes an elephant 🎭 it took me sometime to realise the link 😅

let me explain : the 🐘is used it as a metaphor for problems that no one dare to talk about.

Then he used the drama triangle, concept by Stephen Karpman to describe the 3 roles in that triangle (let’s call them 3 elephants)

We need to address those roles to improve the communication within the team and avoid toxic leadership 🔺

We need to use the green triangle « empowerment triangle » to quit the zone of the drama triangle you and your team

✅ 2 main advice : Take & Elicit responsibility

In other words how to go above the line and how to avoid the Persecutor & Rescuer & Victime roles

 How (not) to measure QUALITY by Michael Kutz 

Task Board FORENSIC by Reiner Kuehn

🏆With the forensic scientist🏆
• you won’t get very far without the cooperation of the team
• an initial analysis with the team takes at least two hours
• you have to listen carefully and be able to connect the information

👭With the team👭
• it’s not that difficult
• interesting what they see
• they get ideas for improvement
• improvement becomes visually measurable

✨More practical tips ✨
Clean up your backlog regularly:
• everything that is older than 12 months will be closed!
• irrelevant, outdated, duplicate items are also removed
• Monitor your WIP:
• how much work has started?
• who has much work started?
Considered for long running tickets:
• the true time working on it
• the idle time (if not worked on)
• Flow Efficiency = working time/lead time (lead time= working time + idle time)
• the easiest way to accelerate is at the idle time…

Living Fearlessly while living with Fear by Lena Pejgan Wiberg

Creating a culture of learning by Vincent Wijnen & Huib Schoots

❓Questions to help you reflect ❓

🔶Phase 1: Describe the experience/situation you wish to reflect upon. What was the actual situation?
🔹What did I have to do in this situation?
🔹What action did I actually take?
🔹What was the outcome of this action?

🔶Phase 2: Looking back: What exactly happened?
🔹What did I see?
🔹What did I do?
🔹What did I think?
🔹What did I feel?

🔶Phase 3: Awareness of essential aspects
🔹What does that mean to me now?
🔹What is the problem (or the positive discovery)?
🔹What has all that caused? What does it involve?

🔶Phase 4: Alternative methods
🔹What alternative methods do I see (solutions or ways of making use of what I have discovered)?
🔹What are their advantages and disadvantages?
🔹What will I remember for next time?

🔶Phase 5: Trial/action
🔹What do I want to achieve?
🔹What should I watch out for?
🔹What do I want to try out?

A journey to sustainability by Alex(andra) Schladebeck

She started with a through back to Jutta Eckstein keynote of last year at AgileTD Zone and how they started their journey as individuals and as a company.

Their takeaways:

• Many of the bigger changes need to come from management
• And they’re often invisible, so talk about them!
• They do cost money!
• On an individual level, it needs to become a quality attribute
• Discussed and weighed
• A potential guideline
• Start where you are: what do you already do?

📏What can you measure?📏
• Take small steps
• Change needs to come from individuals and management
• Awareness and communication help the changes

Human Impact by Fiona Charles

Servant Leadership by Patrick Van Enkhuijzen

#agileTD

Our Workshop “Discover your Explorer Soul” by me and Andrea Jensen

With Andrea, we contributed with a workshop “Exploratory Testing Session” with some additions like the use of personas cards with the charters, how to improve observations using senses and finally how to visualise and get inspired with more ideas through the product map slides available in this link.

“A great exploratory testing session with a lot of fun. Thanks so much @AgentAJay and @emna__ayadi !! 🦄🦄🦄”

Originally tweeted by Eric (@Eric15631536) on 2022.

“Doing some #exploratorytesting in a workshop by @AgentAJay @emna__ayadi at #AgileTD 😀
 #testing“

Originally tweeted by Sergio Freire (@darktelecom) on 2022.

Debrief Differently

Another idea, on how to end a workshop and engage the audience to share their thoughts. Jutta after her workshop about sustainability called “Software for future” she shared cards on the table and asked participants to pick one card to express their opinions and comments about what they learnt from the session.

Thank you for reading this blog post, hope you enjoyed the conference too !
I’ll follow up with another blog post to answer questions we got after our workshop, don’t hesitate if you have any question ?

More readings from other participants

Ping me if you have other content that refers to this conference and you want to include and stay tuned I will share my learnings on Quality Coaching Tutorial in a future post.