CAST 2012 - Day 1

The day started with a quick introduction and welcome note. Other conferences that I have attended  the Q&A time is always around 5-10% of session time but at CAST after each talk speakers are given 25 minutes for Q&A. The total time for a session is 75 minutes and if groups wants the discussion can be further extended. This made all the sessions very interactive and led to great discussions.

 The next surprise was facilitators role,  I haven't come across any conference with such an amazing session facilitation. I always thought facilitators job was to just introduce the speaker but today that belief was shattered. At CAST delegates are given three different colored numbered cards which they can use to ask questions. During a session they show a red card if there is an emergency for example speaker cannot be heard or a green card for any explanation but no questions. In the Q&A session when a green card is shown facilitators notes down all the no.s in the order hands are shown and takes the questions in that order. If someone has a question or comment on current thread a yellow card is shown. This helps a lot and conduces a healthy and consistent discussion without any one hijacking the thread and gave everybody a chance to talk in depth about a topic.

  First half of the day I attended the workshop Brainstorming for Testers by Karen Johnson. This was a very interactive workshop with interesting exercises and was based on the Game-storming principles. Game-storming is a set of practices for facilitating innovation in the business world. A facilitator leads a group towards some goal by way of a game, a structured activity that provides scope for thinking freely, even playfully. Karen talked about Beautiful Testing her book, mental locks to overcome as a tester, the importance of notes taking, how mind mapping is helpful in brainstorming process and the importance of asking questions in software testing. We did few exercise which were fun and learning, let's brief these:

1. First exercise we were given a piece of paper and each one wrote whatever they could think of work related or personal stuff. This exercise helped us to align our thoughts and gave a clarity about each topic. I would recommend  doing this whenever you feel you have too much in your head as this definitely helped me clear my mind before other exercises.
2. For second exercise we divided ourselves into groups and had to come up with a testing problem.  After this we were given a deck of testing heuristics. Test heuristics are kind of cheat sheet to use any time during testing, for example : cidtestd = Customers, Information, Developer relations, Team, Equipment & Tools, Schedule, Test Items, Deliverables. James Bach has been advocating use of these mnemonics in testing and recommends writing your own. We used these mnemonics to apply to our testing problem and come up with a prospective solution.
3. The third exercise was using Phoenix Checklist to solve our testing problem. Phoenix Checklist which was originally developed by the CIA is a thinking tool that gives you multiple creative options for problem solving.  Following are a few examples of the questions on the checklist:

           * Why is it necessary to solve the problem?
           * What is the unknown?
           * What is it you don’t yet understand?
           * What isn’t the problem?

Post lunch was the key note on 'Re-Thinking Management…Re-thinking IT' by Tripp Babbitt and few emerging topics. Next session was Foundations of Facilitation and the Tester’s Environment by Chris Blain & Ben Kelly. They talked about how as a testers we can facilitate the team in such a way as to allow the team to solve their own problems. Few points to be considered are:

Positive Environment: Always emphasize on improvements rather than blaming for an incident in the team. Create an environment free of fear and encourage people to try new things without being scared of failures. John Cleese talk on closed and open mode is very helpful in defining the working environment for maximum creativity : 

• Closed Mode: Purposeful, highly productive, but not creative. Good for getting things done. Usually the default Mode at Work. Should be the right approach when you have a specific task with high priority to be completed in a constrained time.
• Open Mode: Playful, curious, fun, humorous, relaxed, contemplative without goals. Relieves the team of pressure and provides opportunity for creativity and innovation.

   Difficulties faced when driving change: Credibility, hierarchy, power dynamics, Apathy and fear. Changing the physical space brings a big change, in our own office having more open space and our little dogs running around relieves the tension and creates fun environment. Now I will get some sleep for the next fun filled day at CAST.