Bangalore Workshop on Software Testing - 3 on 6th August, 2011

This year, BWST 3 (#bwst3) is delayed by a couple of months and for all good reasons. We were busy with personal and professional stuff. So, here comes the details.

Personal excellence & skill development

We have been noticing over the last few years that those who can change things for the world are those who have been changing things for themselves. As people say revolution starts from within, our experience has been similar to agree with that.

In this year BWST 3,  we are focusing on interacting more on personal excellence and skill development. We want to hear stories (from all participants, not just the speakers) on how they have been working on their personal excellence. Are they being pushed to that? What is their motivation to do it? What is causing them to fail? What support they need and from whom? What kind of skills are they working on? What are the black swan skills that the world should know about? What kind of books they read and how has it helped them? What kind of changes are they making to themselves? What do they plan to change about testing in future?

Does this topic connect with you well? Would you like to present or participate in this? We have very limited seating of 25 this year and this is an invite only conference. You don't need to send us a Salsa dance video to get an invite but you could write down your story of how you built or have been building your skills to us at parimala hut moolya.com titled "BWST 3 speaker" / "BWST 3 participant".

For those who don't know what I am talking about: Please read this, this, this and this. Last year, we had Selim Mia from Bangladesh, Yeshwantrao from Madurai and Vasu from Chennai come all over to Bangalore to attend BWST 2. So, indirectly, I am telling, its open to the world.

Venue:

The venue is at a hotel located in Bannerghatta Road, Bangalore. We shall send the details of reaching the venue to all selected participants and speakers via email.

Time: 

• 8 30 AM to 6 PM - BWST 3 (Late comers will not get Red K card. That's unfair. They will get it but be on time)
• 6 PM till cops ask you to go home - Social gathering with testers

How do discussions happen in BWST?

We will be using K-cards and everybody gets to talk. As an organizer and a talkative person, I hate K-cards, so you can imagine that it gives all an equal chance. As it isn't rocket science to figure out how to use them, we will explain to you over there before we start.

For those who have attended BWST 1 or 1 and 2 or just 2 :) - This year, we have modified the 3 color K-card to just 2. We will have a Red card (High Priority Request - Limited use) and Green card ( Put me on the deck, I have something to say or ask - (Unlimited use)

Cost

As you all know this is a "pay for yourself" style conference and you'd need to pay 550 INR to cover your own expenses of food and refreshments during the day. At the hotel, we will have a complimentary wi-fi facility and power adaptors. So, bring on your tweeting machines and use #bwst3

It is a practice [ :) ] that we hang out in a pub after the conference and hence if you'd like to just join the evening pub meeting with all the testers of BWST 3, write to us separately with your mobile number. We shall SMS and tweet the location of the pub you need to come to. Of course, "pay for yourself".

This year, we have decided to provide T-shirts to all participants and speakers and we are looking forward to wearing one of our own sponsored by oh who else - Moolya

Hurry up! If you are too late, you get to wait list and you will have to pray someone drops out. Spread the word, use the #bwst3

Experience Report : BWST 2

 Experience Report - Bangalore Workshop on Software Testing - 2

3rd April, 2010 @ Shilton Royal, Bangalore

Event Sponsor: Vipul Kocher, President ITB

Photos (and camera) credits: Rahul Mirakhur

 
Bangalore Workshop on Software Testing stepped into its 2nd year on April 3rd, 2010. Why wouldn't it?
This time, it was much more organized than BWST 1. Of course, we learn some lessons, if not all, when we do something.

The groundwork required announcing it on my blog, managing the registrations, speaker invites, cancellations, getting sponsorship, managing the budget, conference and hotel booking. As we had Selim Mia from Bangladesh as a participant, the work also involved helping Selim getting a Visa to India. Santhosh and Parimala were of good help for me in the ground work.

So, the D-day arrived. Some new faces and some old started dropping a couple of minutes earlier to the start time published to them. What? An Indian conference happening on time? That's crazy ain't it? So, till the time arrived some participants started to discuss about Left, Right, Neutral of Politics, Democracy, India and more.

We started off at 9 AM with a check in & self introduction from all participants and Parimala explaining the rules of the day and how to use K cards. She announced herself as Kaali Maata for the day who would facilitate the workshop.

Sharath Byregowda's talk on "How he cleared the trap that prevented him from attending BWST2"

What better way to start than to get a guy who was not likely to attend BWST2 because he had to be in office for someone's estimation being the biggest ever blunder committed. Sharath talked how he cleared the trap to be able to attend BWST2. While he was talking, lots of green cards started popping up. He explained how bugs (that were show stoppers) allowed the test team to buy some time while the development team were fixing them. 

Rahul Verma raised a question, "How can you go and look for show stoppers? Isn't it only when you find a bug you'd know if it is a show stopper?". That triggered some red, blue and green cards to show up. The discussion shifted from that to Severity, Priority and flowed into certifications. Sharath talked about the experience he had in proposing BBST course in his organization.


Ashok's talk on Metrics

So, Ashok T, CEO of Stag Software brought in his wide experience of dealing with metrics and questioned what metrics made sense. He talked about metrics used in various stages of software development and testing and shared his experiences of working with several clients on them. He talked about having helped his clients understand that collecting all these metrics is good but do we really know why we are doing it and what is our goal?


Discussions evolved around metrics and estimation. Not in anyone's experience there, an estimation had gone right. Rahul Mirakhur had to say, "If you get the estimate right, then its not right". There appeared to be a lot of interest from most people to try to get estimation right. I don't think anyone should try getting their estimation right because that is not the only thing that would be helpful to the clients they work for.

Selim Mia

We had a participant and speaker from Bangladesh, Selim Mia. Such passion is great to see and experience. He traveled by train from Bangladesh to Bangalore and back. The moment he stood up, everyone asked him a question unanimously : Please tell us how is testing done in Bangladesh? He had to answer that before he could proceed on his planned talk. I personally think there is lot of potential in Bangladesh but I also hope they avoid falling to traps that we have fallen into.

Selim had a combo for us : An experience report and sought answers to questions he had as a test manager. Based on what he said it occurred to me that the senior management there at Bangladesh were in for results. So, sometimes they gave enough freedom to testers to achieve results - which is good.

Discussions returned to estimation, metrics, scripted and exploratory testing. Vipul had been to Bangladesh, so he shared his experience of interacting with people there and termed it "pleasant". Two names that Indians now know from Bangladesh is "Sajjadul Hakim" and "Selim Mia". I think its time we know more.

Lunch

BWST 1 taught us a few lessons. We went out for lunch and in search of a hotel and spent about 2 hours in BWST 1 on it. This time we organized it in the same hotel and hence we saved a lot of time. We spent munching a good lunch for 50 minutes and then got back to action. Good lunch, I liked the soup & noodles!


Rahul Verma

I was invited to a conference in Germany and I couldn't make it. Instead of me, Rahul Verma did and I think it was a good thing to have happened for the conference. I believe Rahul Verma can deliver the blows that audience needs and that is exactly what he did. His presentation was an exploration into what crap, trap and good means to you versus to those whom you report to or to who reports to you. He delivered some punches to bloggers like me, which I welcome :)

He shared a few experience reports from his office and then led to asking us if we do have an opinion about what we say and how did we arrive at it? He left with a message saying, "Evaluate"

Those who probably did not know Rahul Verma were probably pleasantly shocked by his presentation and I argued over having an opinion and not having an opinion. I feel opinions are in making. Not expressing opinions could be dangerous in some situations while expressing it could be dangerous in a few others.


Vipul Kocher

Testers break rules. Good testers know when it is safe to break rules. So did Vipul. He cut the crap about  crap in the theme and focused on helping us learn the Noun and Verb technique of generating test ideas. The first thing that strikes is his acknowledgment to Elizabeth Hendrickson. It is a strong message to the testing community to owe credits to someone who has helped an idea to be helpful to a larger mass of testing community. Although "Noun and Verb" technique was unheard to many, they did enjoy learning it from someone who had implemented it in the past and shall continue to work on it. I usually don't run out of test ideas and I think through his presentation, the likeliness of me running out of test ideas has further reduced.


Ashok had questions to ask about Noun and Verb technique and I found them interesting. I too have plenty of questions about it but I am going to be working on it for a while before I try to find out answers. There were a few junior level testers who were at BWST this time such as Sai Divya & Shwetha Ghorpade who acknowledged that it will be interesting to implement the technique at their work.

Meeta Prakash


Meeta hit the bell. She took the word crap from the theme and thought about one of the crappiest thing at work - meeting. Her session didnt need any facilitation. She kept polling the audience and questioning things about meeting. It was interesting to know every person except Allmas (lucky Indian) thought there was a lot of time being wasted in meeting. Sometimes people not needed are pulled into a meeting or other times people who are most needed in the meeting are left out because they speak truth. I got reminded of a meeting money burn meter that I saw sometime back which shows how many dollars are burnt in the meeting.

The discussion was interesting. I was reminded of one my ex-manager whose meeting only gets over when his wife calls him. Those who reported to him felt his wife was a savior and a viking.People brought in their experiences of craps and traps of meeting. I once worked for a CMM Level 3 company who was trying hard to achieve CMM Level 5 status. An SEPG team in there ( don't know SEPG : Software Engineering Process Group ) wasted a lot of our testing time. SEPG team ensures that a spelling mistake bug is as expensive as a database corruption by involving the whole team to do a root cause analysis of how the spelling mistake bug went unnoticed. Vasu brought in his experience of how he learned to handle customers diligently  by observing his manager handle it in a meeting. Allmas is way too lucky. She appears to have a team that handles meeting so well. Don't envy her, she is going to be as unlucky as you when she moves out of the organization.

Sukanta Bhatt

Oh this man! The stories he shared on testing medical devices got people doing two things - laughing while thinking. People didn't seem to want him stop. He shared experiences that led to discover new things and realize the value of interacting with customers and being at the customers place watching them how they use the product we develop and test. Was a cool way to end BWST 2 presentations.

Jantha (participants) got curious about medical applications and devices testing space and started to pound him with questions and asking more experience reports on medical devices. Well, that happened over a beer.

Checkout

So, when the bell rang at 5:30 PM, we officially concluded BWST 2. Before we did that, we had a checkout in which each person given less than a minute were asked to talk about one take-away from the whole day. Rahul Verma and Sharath believe that it was cruel of me to ask for "one" takeaway while there were lots. Not that others had just one but these people voiced their opinions about it. The flip side is if someone who is new to this concept of BWST and had been all silent, is easy for them to talk about one take way unlike others who are practiced to speaking a lot.

Ashok & Vipul

The audience weren't exhausted. So, they ignored my call for heading to a pub nearby and asked Ashok and Vipul to talk about experience of running a testing services organization. Questions were posed about China, US, Europe and ANZ regions. The thrust was how do we as Indian testers do better.

Photoshoot

So, we all got shot at the end by one of the hotel staff :)


Beer in Pub

We decided to catch up in Enigma, the Pub @ Koramangala and testers rocked the place. A couple of pitchers and soft drink went in. Girls who had been to BWST 2 also accompanied us to a pub as they knew they are hanging out with some of the gentlemen of the industry. That's it.


Note of thanks

To all participants : Santhosh Tuppad, Sharath Byregowda, Selim Mia, Ashok T, Rahul Verma, Vipul Kocher, Dr.Meeta Prakash, Sukantha Bhat, Swetha Ghorpade, Senthilnathan, Allmas Mullah, Eshwar Kumar, Lakshmi Narasimha, Gokul, Dhanasekar S, Rayanagouda Patil, Vasu Swaminathan, Rahul Mirakhur, Mandeep Singh, Ajay Balamurugadas, Ravisuriya, Yeshwanth Rao, Sai Divya, Chandrasekha, Parimala

To our dear event sponsor: Vipul Kocher
To my co-organizer, Santhosh Tuppad
To the facilitator, Parimala
To you, for reading this.


I shall see at least some of you at BWST 3!

Bangalore Workshop on Software Testing - 2 on 3rd April

If you have been my blog reader for a while, you are likely to be cognizant about Bangalore Workshop on Software Testing or BWST. If you don't know about it, no problem, the post and details are still there. So, BWST – 1 was attended by testers from Bangalore, Pune, and Mumbai. Oh, you should read the experience report and you’d realize how much fun we had or how much fun you missed. 

So here comes the announcement of BWST 2. Santhosh Tuppad and I are organizers of this event and Parimala would be facilitating the workshop. Vipul Kocher, President, Indian Testing Board has volunteered to be a venue sponsor for it.

“Cutting (c)trap and getting good things done”

Many experienced testers of India that I have come across, claim to have made at least one proposal of doing better testing to their management. Most of them also claim that the management doesn’t help to implement the proposed ideas. At times lot of gyaan is also given to them. Some of those testers, cut traps and get good things implemented. We thought it would be valuable to listen to such stories and real life experiences of how testers cut the traps that were trying to prevent them from doing better testing. We also love to hear failures. So, if you failed miserably or maybe you just failed and want to tell us that story, we’d be glad to hear that.

You have a story like that? Send us a one page abstract of your story to banwost@gmail.com with subject "Sharing my story at BWST2" and we will let you know if it makes to one of the six presentations of BWST – 2. If it doesn't, we shall invite you to be a part of BWST2. 

So, if you are not speaking at BWST-2, you still can participate in it.

This is an invitation only kind of workshop. However, you don’t need to upload your jazz dance video to Youtube, to get invited to this. It’s simple, you write an e-mail to banwost@gmail.com with subject "Participant at BWST2" providing details of you, your work and explaining why you should be attending this workshop.  As the cap for participants of this workshop is 30, we would urge you to hurry up. Details of venue and other help you might need will be communicated over e-mail to those registered participants.

As such a workshop is not happening elsewhere in India, we want to keep this open to people all over from India and for people like Mike Kelly, who might be planning to come down :) . We hope that such workshops might jump start in other places from India, too. 

Well, I don't quite understand why testers from other cities allow only Bangalore testers to have every bit of fun in testing? Whatever!

Cost

You don’t need to pay for anything unless you volunteer to sponsor a coffee for all. We just ask you to take care of your expenses such as your travel, stay (if you are coming from other places), and food.

If you are in Bangalore and willing to host a tester who comes from outside Bangalore, send an e-mail to me. Parimala has agreed to host one female tester who might be interested in this workshop and is coming from elsewhere in India. I am hosting one. Oh, by the way, we don't have a Taj Mahal view and gold rim wash basins at home.

Update : March 22: All seats have been filled. If you were planning to request for an invite, you are too late. I am sorry.

Collection of Notes & Experiences: Bangalore Workshop on Software Testing 1

Approved for Publication by all Participants

Theme: Changing the way people test and think about testing
May 2^nd, 2009
Venue Sponsor: Edista Testing Institute & Test Republic


Participants displaying their K - cards
For more pics, click here

Participants ( not in the o: Ajay Balamurugadas, Aishwarya D Shukla, Guruprasad, Manjunath, Rahul Verma, Rahul Mirakhur, Shrini Kulkarni, Manoj Nair, Ravisurya, Santhosh Tuppad, Shikhar Singh, Raghu Sahay, Sharath Byregowda and Pradeep Soundararajan

Bangalore Workshop on Software Testing officially started with the announcement on my blog on April 12, 2009. We had about 15 people rushing in their registration and abstracts for presentation. When you see the list above, you would know who finally made it.

We tried following the LAWST style peer conference and we think we did. I played the role of host and facilitator. I am sure the next time someone else will play the facilitation. I learned facilitation by observing Paul Holland do it in TWST and CAST. He is an amazing tester and facilitator. We used K-cards and that really worked. You would see in photograph, people holding K cards.

We had a check in and introduction (as there were a few faces who did not know each other) at 9:30 AM followed by Ajay kicking off the first presentation.

Ajay’s presentation: Rapid Software Testing

Ajay talked about the change he had after attending my workshop on Exploratory Testing – A Rapid Software Testing Approach and how it helped him log several hundreds of bugs when he started doing a structured exploratory testing. He explained how he struggled with the templates that he had to adhere and how those test cases filled in templates failed to yield coverage and value.

Ajay brought in an interesting thing: “When I started to log more bugs, people were skeptical of how I was doing it. They used to think I was stocking them and releasing it as required”. In this case, Ajay funded himself for the training.

It surprises me that some organizations get their resources trained to help changes to occur to their work and grow skeptical when they get to witness the change.

Before he finished his presentation, he mentioned how the management started seeing Ajay’s work output as a different value than what they expected out of him. What they expected from Ajay was to run as many test cases as possible and what he ended up producing was finding defects and reporting them in their bug tracking system. That is an interesting one – test cases are there, wherever they are, to help testers find bugs and some managers might be misusing it to show progress of testing. I have heard it happens everywhere in the world and not just in India.

During the facilitated discussion that happened after Ajay’s presentation, Shrini mentioned, “The value depends on what stakeholders defines it as”. However, sometimes some stakeholders might need education from a tester to have more meaningful value definition.

Rahul Mirakhur (RM) brought in the idea of a tester wearing different hats and being able to think the value that different stakeholders might want from a tester.

When he interacted with Support teams in an earlier organization, it opened up a completely new world of information source and that, changed the way he did testing thereafter. It also gave a glimpse on how different functions on a project bring in value and in the case of Support teams case, value is more "after" product release.

As the discussion drifted to bugs, Rahul Verma said, “I see bugs as questions we can ask”

Manoj Nair’s presentation on An attempt for better testing

Manoj talked about the opportunity he got in his project where time crunch and amount of testing to be done, enabled his manager to bestow him with a freedom to do free style exploratory testing (without much documentation) for an important feature in his project. The defects and the information he came up by performing free style exploratory testing made the management to postpone the release realizing the danger. He felt happy with his effort, until he was required to explain the details of test coverage across the feature and provide test case document for the tests he conducted for those features. The test case document he prepared were subset of the entire range of tests he performed because he did not have time to document all those tests. He realized the value of tests he did could possibly diminish through that activity. Looking back at it he felt, if he had used Session Based Test Management, he could had done a much better job in providing test ideas document.

During the discussion, I talked about the idea of a Wiki for changes to the product open to all team members and the value it could have for the test team.

Aishwarya, an undergraduate student asked a striking question, “How much information would be an overflow of information?”

The discussion then digressed to – When is the right time to get testers on the project for which all participants had different ideas and experiences. Many organizations have tried bringing in testers early and late and most of them are not yet sure when to bring them in.

I argued that it depends on the kind of a tester an organization is trying to bring in and other factors. Not all testers are the same. I have witnessed organizations that actively ignore testers in requirements review meeting as they have had a bad experience of bringing in a tester. It makes me think that if I lose credibility, it affects other team members in my test group. That is how important it is for each team member to have and build credibility.

Manjunath’s Presentation of Review of Review of Review of Bug Reports

He talked about his experience in one of his previous organization in the context of bug report reviews conducted to help testers log better and credible bug reports. This exercise was undertaken based on the success of improved bug report quality, post a review of each bug reported from the previous project.

Interestingly, in the second project there was another level of review that happened over the review comments of bug reports. The tester, whose bug reports were review had an option to appeal for escalation if he found the review comments did not fit his (her) bug report. It got many testers to defend each of the review comment of the bug reports they logged. Thus spending more time on a single bug report, instead of finding more bugs. That's opportunity cost. That’s like review of review of reviewed bug reports. Yes, we did have a good laugh!

This process was then declared a failure for the second project as its implementation went wrong and 
ceased to exist thereafter, maybe. 

The process can become so worse that it might eat so much time for so little value. On probing, Manjunath revealed that the review process was actually initiated to help testers write better bug reports. All participants were convinced that the way in which the mission was executed might have been poor and what works in one context does not fit another. I am sure we are going to remember Review of Review of Review of Bug Reports experience report.

Doesn’t it help us understand that the best practices do not work for another project within the same organization because the context keeps changing?

During the discussion, we discussed ways of credible bug reporting and shared our experiences of reporting bugs through Video recording of the bug and the value it has had for people who experimented that. It cuts across communication barriers and I am surprised why this practice is not widely used. Oh! 

Someone hasn't talked about it as "best practice" yet? It then digressed to how much English should testers know and then RM talked about practicing English as a daily activity as opposed to a one time upgrade of English skills.

He provided inferences that it’s (relatively) harder to learn language (or command over it) when we get old compared to when we are young. Shrini mentioned that it is not a "rule" by citing his personal experience of how despite being relatively old (compared to most of the audience), he is constantly on the lookout to learn new things.

We got back to reviewing and then discussed on reviewing as a skill and review effectiveness.

Lunch Time folks!

At about 1:15 PM, we walked to a nearby hotel down the street and carried over facilitation-less discussions over lunch table. A heavy lunch

Then when we returned, something helped us get the heat back… Rahul Verma’s presentation on Confessions of a Fallible Tester

This was a very energetic presentation we had for that day and thanks to Rahul Verma, he did it right at the time it was needed ( post lunch )

He made confessions of the mistakes he did right from the start of the career where he thought testing was not his cup of tea. He just did not confess but also explained how he learned from those mistakes and lived better after each big mistake.

One of his confession sounded very cool - “When senior testers in the team said XXXX XXXXXX was the best tool, I believed it” and then he explained how the project suffered because of that tool or the idea of thinking that as THE BEST Tool.

He explained how he cleared that trap and ended up writing a customized plug in to work with XXXX XXXXXX to make it suitable for his testing context.

He then confessed on another mistake of how two blank lines that caused the test environment to fail to enable the product to be tested over it. He or his team members make turned the case by defocusing the customer to something else when the customer observed it. The message was – Test your Test Environment. I think those who do that today are the ones who have realized the value of it. Many testers just setup and start running their test cases without bothering if test environment is what they intended it to be.

The discussion kicked off and we started discussing about tools. The topics varied from Automation Readiness to Vendors bribing managers to sell their tools to Good code versus Measurable Code.

From Rahul Verma to Rahul Mirakhur’s presentation on My career and experiences in testing

He started with a cool question, "When people say WHY will you want to be a software tester, I ask WHY NOT" and I think that was exciting. RM had some interesting observations about IT people in India – “By the time people realize what they are good at they would be in some other domain and would have beefed up living a luxurious life that doesn’t allow them to shift to something they want to do”

He asked another question “Anyone can be trained on software BUT what can they really do?” and discussed that every human is a born explorer and testing is an innate thing and can be developed by proper training.

He then talked about his experience of witnessing developers who moved to testing because they were interested in testing. He then said based on his experience, “Jump into development first if you are serious about becoming a tester”. He shared the experience and value of hiring a person who earlier worked in a support job.

The discussion post this presentation helped in understanding how many different ways are there to get into testing and the value of taking each way. We also talked about the value of learning testing from other fields and that reminded me of CAST2008 conference theme and presentations from there.

RM went back from BWST and started a blog and has promised to keep posting. Another credible blog from an Indian tester on the way - check out.

Sharath Byregowda’s experience of Session Based Test Management

Sharath talked about his experience of experimenting SBTM on the project he worked for and how he influenced other testers, the management and customers with it. He has detailed it in his blog post and I am sure you'd read go there and read it or maybe even learn from it. His team won an award for achieving great results in his organization that has thousands of testers. In addition, Sharath got another award from Michael Bolton.

We had an interesting comment that - By the time an organization implements some new practice as a "best practice" and penetrate every team, the idea is outdated. It reminded me of Ted Neward’s presentation at Oredev08 where he talks about the time difference of programming language birth to becoming an industry usage.

Shrini Kulkarni’s experience of test automation consulting

Shrini talked about his experience of becoming a tester and then about how he grew from being a fresher in software testing to wherever he currently is. He then talked about an interesting experience of Test Automation Readiness Assessment that he was supposed to do for a client in North America and the challenges he had. Shrini talked about his confidence in doing it although his colleagues thought of it as an impossible task. Shrini detailed the value of collaborating with people like Michael Bolton, James Bach, Cem Kaner and others that have helped him evolve to a Test Automation Expert.

 Shrini also talked about his consulting experience and mentioned that almost all test consulting assignments he witnessed, the client was interested in knowing some "universal" or industry standard benchmark related to testing - be it dev to test ratio or % of project cost that could be associated to testing. His experience was that he rarely witnessed anyone challenging those industry standards. In his opinion - That is hindrance for our profession.

Discussions on Test Automation, mindset and skill set followed Shrini’s presentation until the bell rang at 5:30 PM

We had a quick check out and got on to the socializing evening and facilitation-less discussions. We decided on a Food Court in Koramangala and spent about 3 hours there munching food and discussions on Cricket, Movies, Testing, Food, Beer and Wine.

What a fantastic learning to all of us. I must thank Shikhar Singh and Raghu Sahay for coming down from Mumbai and Pune to attend BWST-1. It was fantastic to note that Aishwarya Shukla, an undergraduate student, wanting to do a software testing project as his final year project after attending BWST along with Santhosh Tuppad who completed Practical Software Testing Training at Edista and has been working on several testing assignments as a freelancer. Every participant asked questions that helped other people learn and discover more about themselves and the work they do.

Once again, special thanks to Mohan Panguluri, Pradeep Chennavajhula and Rachna for providing us the space @ Edista Testing. I wish India has more leaders like them who facilitate knowledge sharing and learning in software testing without just being business minded.

Shikhar went back to Mumbai and wrote an e-mail to me regarding Mumbai Workshop on Software Testing that he is planning. Watch out India!

Here is the list of Post It Notes that all participants contributed as an additional reference points to the discussions we had:

• Only testers can talk about Testability
• Book suggestion: Perfect Software and other Illusions about Testing – Jerry Weinberg
• “Every bug is a duplicate of a master bug that the product fails to do something that is important to work for someone” – if that sounds bad - that's still me.
• Philosophy in Golf & Testing – Adam Goucher
• Bug Advocacy – Cem Kaner
• How to investigate Intermittent Problems – James Bach blog post
• “The best tester is the one who gets the most the right bugs fixed” – Cem Kaner in Bug Advocacy
• Do confess when you screw up
• Turning Numbers into Knowledge – A book by Jonathan Koomey
• Lessons Learned in Software Testing – Kaner, Bach, Pettichord
• “Automation could be a dangerous word for a tester” – Rahul Verma
• “If you have failed big, it indicates you rose to a great height” – Rahul Verma
• Value of Checklists – Cem Kaner’s presentation in CAST 08
• Video Record Your Bugs
• The intake I have had from BWST-1, has questioned what I have learned so far. It has helped me to unlearn and learn consistently - Ravisurya
  
• "When I spoke to support teams, it changed the way I tested, forever" - Rahul Mirakhur “
• After I attended Rapid Software Testing Workshop, my testing improved” – Ajay Balamurugadas
• “The value you add as a tester is like NAV of an investment. It changes every day” – Shrini
• General Systems Thinking – A book by Jerry Weinberg

Bangalore Workshop on Software Testing - BWST - 1

I interact with the Western world as much as I interact with the Eastern part. One of the things that the Western world does well that the Eastern part does not even do (significantly), is Peer Workshops. When I funded myself to be at CAST 08 conference, Toronto Workshop on Software Testing (TWST08 ) was a huge bonus for me. Thanks to Fiona Charles and Michael Bolton for allowing me to participate in it.

My first day at Toronto, Canada started in TWST08 even before I could get over the jet lag. I found that the Workshop was a great way to overcome jet lag. What I learned from TWST is still resonating in me and is of great help to my career.

I cant afford to fund myself to attend such peer workshops every year but I can definitely afford to participate in ones that happen in India. I tried to make testers meet happen in Bangalore when Michael Bolton was around here last time and it did not gain momentum after the first meet. I am forced to think that people turned up to hear Michael Bolton and they would turn up again when he's back. Prove me wrong.

Since then I was in a constant look out to meet people who would turn up for learning and I have found a couple of them. am also aware that there could be more people and that's why I am blogging about it.

There were lots of informal meets between Ajay, Manoj, Shrini, Rahul Verma, Vipul Kocher, Dhanashekaran, myself etc... and we did keep craving for more such things to happen. I think India cant afford to wait more to get started with Peer Workshops and this is an announcement for the same.

Mohan Panguluri, COO, of Edista Testing Institute who was awarded for his Thought Leadership in Software Testing in 2008 has opened up Edista's office premises for this Workshop. He has vowed to provide space to all future BWST workshops. Thanks a lot Mohan. You are setting a great example for other CXO's to follow.

Theme of BWST - 1 : Changing the way people test and think about testing
May 2nd, 2009

I believe that the first testing assignment that anyone did was handled pretty bad by them as compared to what they might be doing after a couple of years. However, growth stops at some point for many testers and only a handful make it to be real good testers. Those who turn out to be real good testers constantly kept changing themselves as they learnt new things and those who turn out to be bad were the ones who hardly changed. In India, we know, some of us struggle to change the environment around us to learn as much as we do.Similarly there are people who without much struggle get the environment around them to feel happy without any learning.

So, you could have changed your way of testing or others way of testing and you could have been resistant to change. Send in an ( one page ) abstract of your experience report that you wish to present at the first Bangalore Workshop on Software Testing by 18 April, 2009 and you will be informed if your talk is accepted for presentation. Failure stories are more inspirational than the success ones. I hope everyone has plenty of both sides.

The max limit is of 10 (maybe 15 if pressure builds) participants for the first BWST and hence if you plan to attend, remember that we work on First come First Serve basis. So, send in your abstracts of your experience report that you wish to present and keep in mind the theme when you do that.

Handbook : Please refer to LAWST Handbook and those that can apply to our context, will. We are flexible in changing things based on our first few Workshops.

Note: This isnt open to testers only from Bangalore. Anyone's welcome.

Also, you can start your own set of peer workshops in anywhere in India ( or anywhere in the world ) and no one is going to stop you. When you start, kindly let me know about it in advance so that I can plan to be there, learning from you all.

Email id to send in your abstracts: banwost [ at symbol ] gmail.com and we will have our own website soon. By May 19th, I will post an update on this and that's how we proceed. Are you going to remain silent? Are you going to change?