It was sometime in Sep 2019 that Mahesh from The Test Tribe Community called me and started discussing about TestAway Shimla. One of the tasks given to me was to come up with two hands-on workshops for the participants.
One, I did not know much about the participants experience.
Two, the workshops had to be new and never done before.
Though I tried my best to convince Mahesh that with the new participants, the experience of a old workshop is going to be new, he had a clear NO. Remember the trainer at the gym who doesn't take any excuse - That's Mahesh in my eyes. He gets the best out of me eventually and that's why I continue to engage with him (selfish me).
I always appreciated the depth of BBST courses (Foundations and Bug Advocacy) and continue to focus on both the fundamental concepts as well as hands-on exercises.
So, I came up with a workshop where any number of participants can participate, open for anyone irrespective of domain, experience and all of this via exercises only. This was a little bold as there was ZERO slides and the workshop starts and ends with exercises and feedback on each exercise.
Will it work, will I make a fool of myself giving people feedback on the exercises? With Mahesh's freedom and confidence, I experimented. There were testers with more than 8 years of experience and a few with more experience than me.
When the workshop completed, testers were disappointed not because they found the exercise simple or complex but because they knew what had to be done, which traps to be avoided yet they fell in the same traps. They nodded when I gave them feedback and when I asked them how are they feeling - they answered that they could have done better. The exercise exposed their lack of practice (for some) and traps (for few others) and so on.
Where I used to share theory and then the exercises, now I was giving them exercises and wrapped the theory as part of feedback.
Mahesh and I knew that this is GOLD and will help a lot of testers. So, we experimented with more exercises and incorporated feedback from different batches, did it online too (thanks to the pandemic), and slowly graduated from
1 Day - Three exercises + Demo to
2 Days - Lifecycle of Testing + Demo.
What changed?
Instead of three exercises of 45-60 mins each, we added more exercises highlighting each concept of shorter duration. The intensity, approach remained the same - Constraint driven learning, Exercise first - feedback later, Exploratory approach from start to end.
Concepts discussed:
- Requirements Analysis
- Learning the product
- Moving away from test cases
- Planning your #testing sessions
- Estimation
- #Automation (When and When not to use)
- Tools for #productivity (Hint: https://lnkd.in/gUxu_N7)
- Reporting & many more exercises.
And now we are here: the TENTH Batch
Date: 27, 28 Nov 2021
Time: 1 PM to 8 PM IST
Link: https://thetesttribe.com/testing-lab-advanced-software-testing-workshop/
#learning
See you there!
