Tuesday, January 12, 2016

The story of a 'small' vodQA ending up being 'x-large'

We are extremely happy to start the new year with YASV (Yet Another Successful vodQA) event, this time with the theme - Agile Testing Workshop, conducted on 9th January 2016 in ThoughtWorks, Pune office.

Why the theme - "Agile Testing Workshop"?

Over the past few years, after having worked on numerous projects, interacted with a lot of clients (and their partners / vendors), and gaining insights from speaking with individuals & teams in conferences & organizations, we (the vodQA Pune team), realized that a decent portion of the Software (testing) Industry lacks decent / good understanding of Agile and effective Testing on Agile projects / teams.

So, we decided to conduct the next vodQA in Pune - focussed on Agile Testing to answer questions like - "What is Agile and what does it mean to Test on Agile projects / teams?"

Highlights

  • When we started planning for this edition of vodQA, the plan was to keep it very lean - in planning, execution and participation as well. For this, we planned to keep this vodQA 'small'. Little did we realize it would end up being a patiala peg.
  • What started out as an event aimed at 30 attendees soon shot up to 180+ RSVPs on Facebook to 160+ confirmations and eventually we had 85+ attendees. Including ThoughtWorkers, we (again) crossed 100+ people for vodQA Pune! - There went a lot of our 'being-lean' out of the window!
  • This event was completely driven by the Facebook group (from announcements to registrations to updates).
  • We had a quite a few attendees travel from out of Pune for vodQA (ex: Mumbai, Nagpur)
  • This was one of the most vocal, enthusiastic and interactive audience vodQA Pune has seen. They shared their experiences and asked a lot of questions as well.
  • True to our objective for this vodQA, we ensured there was sufficient time between sessions / workshops to facilitate discussions and answer specific questions from the attendees.
  • We had impromptu fishbowl discussion on certain Parking Lot questions.
  • After the first session of the day (Agile Game), the attendees celebrated (it was over) by bursting the balloons - early Diwali some would say … :)
  • A huge shoutout to the organisers who were constantly tweaking their execution methods, days before the event as our expected turnout gradually rose from 30 to 100+.

Agenda and Slides

TopicBySlides
Welcome noteAnand Bagmar
Agile GameAbhay Dalvi, Vardhan Bhatt & Vikrant Chauhan
Tea break

What is Agile Testing?Amit Gundiyal & Prasad Kalgutkarhttp://www.slideshare.net/vodqanite/what-is-agile-testing-56891493
Effective Strategies for Distributed TestingPreeti Mishrahttp://www.slideshare.net/vodqanite/strategies-for-distributed-testing
Lunch

Testing the Mysterious SphereAnjali Wadhwa, Ashwini Ingle & Preeti Mishrahttp://www.slideshare.net/vodqanite/testing-the-mysterious-sphere
Break

Test Automation - Principles, PracticesVardhan Bhatt & Vikrant Chauhanhttp://www.slideshare.net/vodqanite/lessons-learnt-from-test-automation-principles-practices
Tea + Snacks break

Patterns in Test Automation (Framework + Data)Anand Bagmarhttp://www.slideshare.net/abagmar/patterns-in-test-automation
 

Feedback

  • Overall workshop was wonderful. Presentation and content was good. Helpful to understand and implement in our current process.
  • Agile testing game taught us to focus more on quality than quantity & take feedback as soon as possible from the PO
  • Though I am not working in Agile env currently, I understood whole session and got to learn something.

The always rocking vodQA Pune team!!
vodQA Pune team

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