“Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.”
― Peter F. Drucker
Having a clear direction where you want to go, what you want to achieve is a helpful driver to move forward and remove any potential barriers that could exist in your way. It’s absolutely worth to take a moment and reflect on what we’ve done and what drives us forward for another new year.
I’m writing this blog to share some of the things I’ve done during 2022 mixed between personal and professional achievements, and combined with fun and challenges I’ve take from making sushi to speaking on stage.
I splitted this blog into 12 sections to facilitate the navigation (note: there is no special link between those sections)
- 🎯 My Mission as Consultant
- 📅 Testing Conferences Participation
- 💻 Other Challenges at Sogeti
- 📜 Visual Facilitation: From Novice to Real Time Sketchnoter !
- 📙 My Weird Story With Books
- 🍣 The Sushi Challenge
- ✈️ Traveling and Gym
- 💬 Celebrating 3 years Blogging
- 🍧 The ICECREAM Challenge
- 💡 The Weirdest Idea of the Year
- 💫 Flying Experience at Weembi
- ✨ Happy new Year 2023 and See you Soon
🎯 My Mission as Consultant
I started the year closing my old assignment, where I learnt a lot of things on how to work in a transversal role, coaching the team, creating strategies and doing facilitation.
Then in februray I started a new assignment having a different dimension inside the team, as an integration test leader in a complex project that has dozens of integrations with external and internal systems. I had the chance to collaborate with different teams in 3 different locations and coordinate with them.
One of the challenges, the project started from scratch and we had to set different things, so I felt like working many roles at once from scrum mastering to test automation to planification to setting the test strategy …
One of the achievements, that I’m proud of is “API Testing” mixed with other kind of integrations and also doing effective test reporting that tells a story and not random numbers.
It was actually my first time doing API testing in real project, where I had the chance to put the theory and the tips I gathered during the last period from blogs and conferences in practice and I truly enjoyed it (although I felt it’s something scary before starting it ! ).
Outside from that project, I contributed also to running another testing community at our client, where we run transversal retrospectives and make other projects more accessible from functional and testing perspective by sharing our takeaways between each other with a frequency of about 1 month.
📅 Testing Conferences Participation
I contributed to 6 conferences as a guest speaker in 4 different countries France, Netherlands, Danemark and Germany ! and those conferences are my main motivational factor that allow me to stay uptodated and learn from the world experts in our fields which help me grow in the direction I want by finding the right persons doing the things I want to do and that allows me to expand my testing and quality engineering skills.
Some of the conference takeaways, and experience in the below blogs:
- https://emnaayadi.com/2022/07/03/eurostar-conference-interview/
- another blog coming soon containing answers to all your questions during our Exploratory Testing workshop
at EuroSTARConf, I’m ranked as the most active member in the app, that wouldn’t be possible without the presence of the awsome Jane Nash that is my colleague from Capgemini Danemark we met via the app then in real life then we become good friends 🙂
There were great discussions and challenges and Chris was the one who triggered most of the threads in that app before the conference !
💻 Other Challenges at Sogeti
Celebrated my first year with Sogeti in september 2022, and I’m happy to be an active member of both our Agile and Testing communities.
Some of the things that I did this year:
- Sending newsletter every month to talk about testing news happening at national and international level
- Contributed to run 5 meetups including hosting testbash world at our Sogeti office
- Contributed to run 1 meetup within our national Transformation Testing Community, where we shared our learnings from the JFTL conference
- Contributed to one of the SoNews Engage meetup, by sharing the importance of the role Agile Quality Coach
- Co-Creating the TMAP Game with my colleagues from Sogeti NL (Read More about it here)
- Organized with my colleague Eric Hazoumé 2 Power point Roulette sessions within Agile Community, where we had lot of fun where our colleagues were given the stage with a complete random subject and challenging slides that could have no direct link to the main topic and participants have to establish the story, which means lot of jokes and good vibes.
We had great time during the year at Sogeti, which motivates me and confims that I made good choice when choosing my next move to “ENGAGE”.
We ended the year with a nice game party and lots company celebrations and a team dinner.
Looking forward for 2023 and the challenges that I have set, one of them is creating an international community within Capgemini/ Sogeti in collaboration with Sanne Visser and other colleagues from different countries and also to join the Sogeti Labs and contribute to the international Lab of Experts ! another challenge is to work on quality coach role and apply what I’ve learned from Anne Marie charett Master class on “Becoming a Quality Coach”, also I want to perform testing assessements and deliver testing training courses, I’ll tell you more about it months later.
📜 Visual Facilitation: From Novice to Real Time Sketchnoter !
I’m very proud by the end of this year, doing real time sketchnotes and not spending 3 hours later trying to re-do my draft notes into one beautiful sketch ! I even added a whole section Sketchnotes in my blog where I’ll share sketchnotes that I’ve made in the last period.
Agile Testing Days 2022 was the trigger for me, and also seeing Eveline‘s performance last year I got even more inspirations to do it in real time like her.
📙 My Weird Story With Books
Last year, I set a challenge to read a list of books, although some efforts, public commitments but I still not reaching the goal I set, on the other hand I learnt that defining a list of books during the beginning of the year is not what I want. (curious to hear your tips how to read your books and reduce your Tsundoku)
Because I ended the year by listening or reading other books than the ones I set at the beginning of the year, and I build a new habit of listening to books from Amzon Audible instead of reading them. it works well with me, mostly during lunch walks. Lucky that I have 2 great parks near my work office and also near me when working from home.
So at the end it’s not bad, I’m still happy with books I could read this year one of my favorite books for the year: ‘The Culture Map‘ and ‘Scatter Brain‘
So for next year, I will not say I’ll read that list of books, but I’ll keep it spontanous, following my motivation every period on what I want to read (or listen).
🍣 The Sushi Challenge
That’s maybe an idea for an entire future blog post, how I was challenged to make sushi and how I succeeded to deliver an awsome first version of Sushi hand made where my team gave me 100/10.
✈️ Traveling and Gym
2022 is an offical back to normal after pandemic, where there are no more restrictions to travel, one of my personal objectives back to travel again and do regular workouts, I can consider this objective reached and will try to expend it more for next year
- I visited 3 new countries, and also 3 already visited before countries, Exploring 17 cities in total !
- I succeed in keeping the gym a continuous habit without stopping like I did in previous years.
💬 Celebrating 3 years Blogging
In november 2019, I asked my friends what content they prefer reading in case I start blogging.
To be honest I was not even sure if I can get the motivation and energy to start that journey that I’m having now.
Although I was almost to plan a blog about traveling tips and experiences, it turns out to be a testing blog with a travel twist. I hope those who voted for traveling aren’t disappointed, I promise to make at least one blog post 100% traveling related next year.
- 56 blog posts were published
- +48000 views since its creation
- Readers from 137 countries visited my blog (on a personal note, I’m jalous my blog travelled more than me xD)
🍧 The ICECREAM Challenge
It’s incredible to add more joy to your journey with simple challenges that has nothing to do with work, that’s one of the challenges with my awsome testing friends Chris and Sophie, posting icecream pictures whenver we eat one.
💡 The Weirdest Idea of the Year
At Agile Testing Days we break the ice to our workshop by saying that my friend Andrea is coming from top north of Germany where they have weird Licorice ! But it didn’t stop there, few days later we started thinking to compare Lcorice and Testing, we got a serious interaction and great answers worth to consider maybe for a future conference !
Reach out to me or Andrea if you find more patterns between Licorice and TESTING 🙂
I hope you enjoyed learning some insights from my journey that my mind remember to share in this blog post, when I started writing I have no idea what shall I put in this blog post then some ideas come to this blog post, the year review blog is not agile but it gives a good view on what happened. Late this year, Marie Drake inspired me on the way she writes month reviews in her blog, small iteration where we can’t forget things we have done. Will consider that in the future maybe 🙂
💫 Flying Experience at Weembi
The (little) adventure of the year, trying to fly ! I liked the experience and looking forward for an outdoor version to perform a real skydiving
Sky diving about to let go
Walkin’ the wire with nothing below
Don’t you know
Don’t you know
Cause life is a show
In every shade of the rainbow
We’re jumpin’ through fire
Let’s go
✨ Happy new Year 2023 and See you Soon
I hope this season and the New Year are filled with warmth, comfort and good cheer! Happy New Year everyone and hope to see you soon online or at future events in 2023.
Curious to hear your feedback about my year and what section did you like the most in this blog post ?
Emna Ayadi 