How do teams share their understanding on the common goals? It is either audio or visual. Recording each talk and storing them ( tagged) is not the most effective way to share common knowledge. Sketching is not new to agile teams. We are taking it a step forward in the form of Vision Boards. Vision Board – is creative visualization of your goals. While our focus in this talk, remains on- how teams could use the board, Individuals use these in order to make their life goals into reality. There are pictures or sketches of what they want – all pasted together on one board – so they constantly remind themselves of their ultimate goals in the bigger scheme of things. These goals may not be achievable with one task. They may need a series of tasks which do not directly seem to be connected with the goal. But these visualizations captured - are very good indicators of what success means to one.

We used Vision Boards to visualize our customer experience, their reactions and expected patterns of use for our application. This board single handedly kept all our teams aligned and as many changes happened – the teams knew their true north when they were discussing how to design the screens and which features to build on (priority). Our already agile teams were constantly looking at the short term goals of prioritized features, but vision board helped them reduce chaos and clutter and saved lot of time on understanding the overall requirement - it also served as the basis for User Stories.

Most testers follow the career path their organisation is offering them. Sometimes, this path seems dated. Specially when one compares them to other organizations which seem to be taking testing more seriously or are atleast more advanced in their approach to people and technology.

What could be the possible options beyond a certain point as a tester? Will present certain questions to the testers - What do you enjoy doing most? What comes naturally to you? How does the competition look like? What could you potentially learn? What are the alternates or extended skills you enjoy - data science more or engineering more or something else? What are your super powers? What could be the path of least resistance to make a shift. Will share leading examples of some "popularly successful" career.

In the 2nd half of the talk - will get the audience to engage to understand the designations and potential career paths that interests them. Will discuss out specific ambitions and goals and share what has worked for others and what could work for them & how to go about it.

Testing for StartUps is very different than testing for big businesses. Mostly, because of the lack of funds and time to market – which are common constraint across the globe. But most importantly, because the startups are mostly pivoting, if not completely, then in parts. Their feedback cycle have to be super-efficient and really quick. Users are directly involved and lot of monitoring and user metrics decide the way forward for the product.

When testing for such fast moving startups , one needs to strategize smarter with their time, funds and tools. The approach taken is indeed out of the box sometimes. Unlike, existing businesses where the end goal is defined, startups are lot of times open to a new end, which is more glorious than what they had originally planned for. (This may sound like machine learning has been inherently applied.)

The ideas and responses will be radically different and pretty disruptive, for some routine questions for developing the test approach, in case of a startup- Why are we testing, what are we testing, Who will test, what will get impacted, how to test, which tools can help, what metrics are the business measuring, how much time do we have….

Learn to test for startups in the coolest and most efficient way. Be useful to your business.

For so many years, testers have focused on functionality, ensuring the applications are working properly, stable, and reliable. However, in today’s world, with so many competing applications, products, and software packages, it is critical that testers also examine the UI/UX element of each deliverable. If your organization is not building UI/UX testing into your test planning, then you are increasing the risk that your product may be left behind by competitors. And if you have not experienced the art and craft of UI/UX test planning and execution, then this workshop will help you and your organization learn the proper methods to do so.

There are very few known techniques that can accurately and consistently shape a good User Interface (UI) or User Experience (UX). While most of the companies are spending a lot of time and energy deciding the colors and bars on the screen, frankly beauty comes second. It’s also a known fact that users resist change. So how can you test for the acceptability of these changes in a way that’s beneficial to your company in terms of revenue, inbound marketing, and customer acquisition, without offending customers to the point that they make a massive exodus and go to your competitor?

The goal to success is making the customers happy and pleased with the product, while ensuring they do not feel foolish or confused. In this workshop, we will go through case studies of real world apps and stories of evolving UI and UX. We will observe how that impacts the User Experience for better or worse.

Is your team using requirements as the basis for testing? What kind of testing do you do going beyond requirements? Has it occurred to you ever that the requirements may not be enough or may not be correct?
Moving a step further – what if no formal requirements are given - How would you approach your testing then? Does there exist a scientific method of testing without requirements which can be depended on to find the critical defects in time.

One such approach for testing is Context Driven Testing.

If you're like the majority testers, you may be aware of the term and may believe in the context driven approach. However, if you are unsure how to integrate it within your practice, and also, is there a conversion process or integration for your team that practices traditional requirements based testing and wants to go context driven now.

This workshop will appeal to testers with every level of experience with CDT. If you're unsure what CDT is, but want to better understand how it works, you should attend. If you're aware of CDT and how it can transform your testing practice, but unsure how to implement it, you should attend. If your team is using CDT but you want to look for ways to continually improve and expand your practice, you should attend. Particularly will interest undergoing transition from waterfall to Agile or moving to CI/CD soon.

We will cover many hands-on team exercises within this workshop, focused on providing each attendee an increased confidence and understanding of how context driven testing can help them be an awesome thinking tester! – in defining quality criteria, identifying the risks, calling out them timely, reporting in a way management understands and adapting to constantly changing needs.

How do teams share their understanding on the common goals? It is either audio or visual. Recording each talk and storing them ( tagged) is not the most effective way to share common knowledge. Sketching is not new to agile teams. We are taking it a step forward in the form of Vision Boards. Vision Board – is creative visualization of your goals. While our focus in this talk, remains on- how teams could use the board, Individuals use these in order to make their life goals into reality. There are pictures or sketches of what they want – all pasted together on one board – so they constantly remind themselves of their ultimate goals in the bigger scheme of things. These goals may not be achievable with one task. They may need a series of tasks which do not directly seem to be connected with the goal. But these visualizations captured - are very good indicators of what success means to one.

We used Vision Boards to visualize our customer experience, their reactions and expected patterns of use for our application. This board single handedly kept all our teams aligned and as many changes happened – the teams knew their true north when they were discussing how to design the screens and which features to build on (priority). Our already agile teams were constantly looking at the short term goals of prioritised features, but vision board helped them reduce chaos and clutter and saved lot of time on understanding the overall requirement - it also served as the basis for User Stories.

For many years, we have heard discussions around diversity. You may be tempted to think of just one kind of diversity: Where we have marches in the streets, organizations protesting for their rights, new laws being passed, and new organizations being created.

We see something similar in the software testing industry. We see organizations being created to support diversity. We see articles and focus groups dedicated as well. We are even seeing conferences dedicating specific segments of their program to women in testing and selections being made based on diversity. We have listened to the strong opinions from both sides of the discussion. We have heard their cases, and very likely, we have agreed with some of the points at every angle.

And then there are other kinds of diversities we deal within Software Development and Software Testing. More emanating due to the very nature of the work. Diversity in work could mean whole different world for the line of business. As with the other diversity – we have the protests, debates, and disagreements at work too, but it is important that we understand what is the core problem that we are trying to solve. And are we at the end of day adding value to the business?

There are some underlying factors that could help both the situation and be our guiding force to make the system more productive.

In this session, Smita Mishra, will provide a new and enlightening perspective on the diverse world of software testing. She will share her discussions, research, and findings from all angles and leaders within the software testing community. You will learn both the myths and facts around the need for diversity in our industry. And most importantly, you will leave this session with a new way of thinking around how the future looks for diversity in the workplace.

Note : Can do as a 20 minute talk too

For so many years, testers have focused on functionality, ensuring the applications are working properly, stable, and reliable. However, in today’s world, with so many competing applications, products, and software packages, it is critical that testers also examine the UI/UX element of each deliverable. If your organization is not building UI/UX testing into your test planning, then you are increasing the risk that your product may be left behind by competitors. And if you have not experienced the art and craft of UI/UX test planning and execution, then this workshop will help you and your organization learn the proper methods to do so.

There are very few known techniques that can accurately and consistently shape a good User Interface (UI) or User Experience (UX). While most of the companies are spending a lot of time and energy deciding the colors and bars on the screen, frankly beauty comes second. It’s also a known fact that users resist change. So how can you test for the acceptability of these changes in a way that’s beneficial to your company in terms of revenue, inbound marketing, and customer acquisition, without offending customers to the point that they make a massive exodus and go to your competitor?

The goal to success is making the customers happy and pleased with the product, while ensuring they do not feel foolish or confused. In this workshop, we will go through case studies of real world apps and stories of evolving UI and UX. We will observe how that impacts the User Experience for better or worse. We will look at building UX testing strategy and implementing UX testing techniques. We will look at the popular tools used to perform UX testing and how to best use them in each phase of not just testing but UX designing overall. Some of the tools to be discussed are - testflight / heap/hubspot / eyetracking tools / A/B testing / Screen recording tools.

There are so many stories in the market of both successful pivoting and failure cases. Some see Pivoting as the backfire of shallow design and result of not having thought through before launch. However, most see Pivoting as a powerful tool used by wise developers and product owners to retain their acquired customers.

Whatever may be the reason - its not news that businesses evolve, change and PIVOT. As Alan Spoon says -

“Pivoting” is a familiar word in the startup world.  When your first business model isn’t working (and this happens more often than not), the CEO and team pivot to plan B.  These are deep breath moments! But pivoting doesn’t necessarily mean desperation.  It can be a tool to discover additional growth--growth you might otherwise have overlooked. Businesses can grow beyond their initial dreams by re-imagining their assets and talents, thinking more broadly about the customer problems they solve, and accessing growth capital to seize the new high ground.

Keeping this understanding of Pivoting in the background, we at PoolWallet are proud to share our story of launch, growth, not so good growth, how we found our key bottlenecks (Any guesses how many users we interviewed?) and what were our conclusions and how much we decided to pivot. How we validated our thoughts on Pivoting (ever tried talking to an investor?). Basically trying to share with you our launch, less than good response, re-launch, validations we took seriously, feedbacks we kept aside and results of the same. All of this with minimum budget spend.

How you think defines how you act.  Agile is more of a people practice than huge technical methodology. 

In traditional setup with waterfall methodology where each phase of the projects are serially aligned and more often than not take longer, testing is slow paced and quite reactionary. When moving to an agile setup, it requires a paradigm shift in the mindset. 

Its important to open our minds towards not only learning more technical but also soft skills and inspire our teams to do so too. Moving from competition to collaboration (with developers), moving from mere bug finding to bug investigation, moving to exploratory testing.

Emphasis is laid on team members and interactions instead of processes and tools. The idea is to encourage testers to think more about Agile as mentioned in Agile Manifesto than getting blindly into agile projects.