Month: May 2014

Let’s Test 2014 – sketchnotes

The busy month of May offered me another opportunity to practice sketchnoting: the wonderful Let’s Test conference in Runö – Stockholm. The conference was, as always, fantastic. A good number of the sessions were experiential workshops that invite participation rather than sketchnoting (although I might make summary notes on them later on), but there was still enough goodness to get drawing.

I am growing fond of the live noting of conference talks – with the unspoken rule of posting it on twitter before the last attendee leaves the room. I very much like the live time-pressure aspect of it since it doesn’t allow my evil perfectionist side to take over. My DEWT-friend and colleague Ruud Cox has gently tried to nudge me into two-stage sketchnoting or even non-live sketchnoting (books, recorded talks). As my conference calendar is fairly empty for the rest of the year, maybe I’ll have a go at that.

tltweet

40 years of trying to play well with others - Tim Lister

 

amtweet

 

 

The DIY guide to raising the testing bar - Alessandra Moreira

 

mh-cwtweet

 

 

Can playing games actually make you a better tester? - Martin Hynie - Christin Wiedemann

dhtweet

Realism in Testing - Dawn Haynes

 

jbtweet

A critical look at best practices - Jon Bach

 

 

 

StarEast sketchnotes

One of my personal goals for this year is to become better at sketchnoting. And becoming better – for me – means: working at expanding my visual library and – more importantly – practice, practice, practice!

Last week I attended StarEast in Orlando, and testing conferences happen to provide a wonderful opportunity to get some of that much needed practice in.

Armed with a Confidant notebook (a new brand of notebooks by Baron Fig) and a set of sharpie pens, I went to work. Apart from the Selenium and Webdriver tutorial by Alan Richardson (hands-on coding does not match well with equally hands-on drawing), my keynote and the one preceding it (duh!) and a presentation about game testing of which I missed the first ten minutes, I took notes for every single talk I attended.

I like taking notes this way – the timed challenge provides me with much needed focus (no zoning out here), and the notes seem to stick way longer. As a bonus: even if the content does not particularly appeal to me, the added note taking practice still makes it worthwile.

So, without further ado, here goes:

SketchNote Rob Sabourin  SketchNote Erik Van Veenendaal

SketchNote Lightning Talks  SketchNote Theresa Lanowitz

SketchNote Michael Bolton  SketchNote Lloyd Roden

SketchNote Jennifer Bonine

 

 

 

My StarEast Keynote

This morning I delivered “Testing in the Age of Distraction: Flow, Focus, and Defocus in Testing” as a keynote at the StarEast conference in Orlando. The talk was well attended – I believe 900 people in the room and another 700 in the virtual conference.

I felt honored to be invited for what was my first official keynote – it was also the first time that so many people were simultaneously paying attention to me (or at least they pretended to).

I believe it went well: I managed to get my message across, enjoying every minute of it. Judging by the feedback so far, others did too. The subject seemed to resonate with a lot of the attendees.

I received a lot of “slide” requests (if you can call them that in Prezi), so here is the link to the online version (unfortunately, embedding prezi presentations in wordpress is not working very well):

http://prezi.com/jpqhbabuheqc/