Although I am not very interested in New Year’s Eve and passing in a new year from the protocol perspective, I think its a good time to point out some general directions.

I believe overall the past year was very good in relation to my testing experience.

The details are important, but can change, that’s why I tent to set general goals (it also gives more options to use as a solution):

• Find suitable ways to keep being known in the testing field. This is important especially in finding new clients. But not only there:(also) government paperwork, renting/buying a house, dealing with a bank, unblocking quickly the Paypal account , general trust in many situations…
• Deal with the particular problems that might appear while trying to raise a reputation: more responsibility, accepting constructive criticism, detect and reply properly to nonconstructive criticism
• Continue learning about testing. The more I learn, the more I think I know less. But its still a good feeling
• Do the best job I can do with the clients, so I can bring value to them
• Do the best job I can do  at the conferences I was invited this year
• Solve anything that might come on the way

On the 26-28 th I participated to the “QA&TEST 2011 conference”. I didn’t know too much about it before going there, but I was pleasantly surprised by the way it was organized.

The city of Bilbao is awesome at day and at night. It looks very calm and relaxed, not like a very big metropolis. I enjoyed the Guggenheim museum visit.

I couldn’t relate to all the presentations there, but definitely is a way to see what is done in the testing industry in some parts.

Did my workshop in the second day, using an application that you can find here www.testalways.com/Bilbao/. This presentation had the purpose to show a test project in a simplistic way, in which cost, risks coverage have to be considered like in a real situation. It used gaming and interactive ideas from James Bach and Michael Bolton. My skills and way to show it are not close to theirs. So I prefer to take the criticism for the bad part and they deserve the credit for what is good.

Met some interesting people like Michael Stahl, who Shmuel recommended before; Malini , which I knew from the EuroStar video competition I participated and who gave nice words for my workshop; Ray Arell seems like a nice person to talk to; also the other great people I’ve met that I don’t remember now. Thanks for all who tweeted related to my workshop.

Thanks also for the organizers  Software Quality Systems S.A.(SQS) who did a very nice job.

Last week I went to Hamburg for the first German Agile Testing and Exploratory Workshop (GATE).

The event took place in Hamburg and it was my first trip there. The city seems like a nice place, where everything gives the impression of cleanness and organized work. If you want to try something excentric, Reeperbahn at night is the place to be. Therefore, you can select what you consider suitable for you.

The workshop had a few participants, Meike Mertsch, Markus Gärtner, Maik Nogens , Christian Baumann and myself, but it turn out to be a really productive and interesting meeting. Some of the initial topics were more developed than others, turning the discussion to focus on only some aspects ,and thus, causing other topics to be left out, but for some other time. It was a really good stimulation of the brain.

In some workplaces and most corporations you are just limited. When you have the chance to do a little bit more and add a personal touch to your work, something happens and you end up being busy with other secondary tasks. Meetings and workshops are a great opportunity for the testers, in this case, to come with new ideas and more important, have their ideas put into practice.

Therefore, I thank Markus and Meike’s company it-agile GmbH for making the event possible, by letting us use their space, and because I had the chance to meet interesting people in the beautiful city of Hamburg.

Markus’ session with the dice game, done by Michael Bolton and James Bach particularly comes to my mind as I have to admit that I didn’t really recognize the pattern instantly, even if it was the same James practice with me more than an year ago. And then I thought that my solution was expressed mostly by numbers and it could have been represented in a visual way. Thus, I realized visual memory is stronger than memorizing numbers.

You can check Markus blog post on it for more information, blog to which I couldn’t add too much myself.

Maik had a nice story in which he described the notion of “Charity Testing”, a term that he coined. Basically, if you want to learn for yourself, the best approach is to use it in a specific context, by finding projects that are done to help the community, as a volunteer tester. Although maybe “volunteer” is not the exact word.

Meike played a lot with stickers and kanban. I personally took from this a sketch idea for future implementations as puzzles or even ways to write an article.

I also tried my beta picture puzzle exercise, but turned out to be a bad idea not to mention that it was not complete. Of course everyone in the room was a tester and my app was thoroughly analyzed and broken. It got a set of bugs that I wasn’t aware of, but will try to fix it.

The topics presented were interesting, but what was really great it was the way the whole workshop went and ideas changed.

It will be harder probably to keep the same spirit of sharing among larger number of participants, as in large crowds you have lesser time and tend to self-censor yourself about what can be said or not. But, I would gladly participate to a second workshop next year.

As I said, the subjects and topics were good, but what really matter was the way we shared the ideas. If there is a job where one can have this constant environment of sharing ideas and come up with better solutions every day, I would really like to have the chance to experience this once again. I realize, however, it is hard to find such a thing.

I attended the Weekend Testing Americas no 18, where James Bach was the invited facilitator.

The mission had the purpose of doing  self-training activities related to Weekend Testing chapters.

Basically each participant had to edit this document Charters-How-To with the scope of improving it.

More details on http://weekendtesting.com