On the testing community merry-go-round

This tweet from Katrina Clokie started a long and interesting discussion on Twitter:

I'm not sure how long I have the patience to keep participating in the same conversations in the testing community. The more I connect beyond our discipline, the more I feel that we've been talking in isolation for over a decade and working ourselves into a corner.

— Katrina Clokie (@katrinaclokie) December 5, 2018

I was a little surprised to see Katrina saying this as she’s been a very active and significant contributor to the testing community for many years and is an organizer for the highly-regarded WeTest conferences in New Zealand. It seems that her tweet was motivated by her recent experiences at non-testing conferences and it’s been great to see such a key member of the testing community taking opportunities to present at non-testing events.

The replies to this tweet were plentiful and largely supportive of the position that (a) the testing community has been talking about the same things for a decade or more, and (b) does not reach out to learn from & help educate other IT communities.

Groundhog Day?

Are we, as a testing community, really talking about the same things over and over again? I actually think we are and we aren’t, it really depends on your lens as to how you see this.

As Maria Kedemo replied on the Twitter thread, “What is old to you and me might be new to others” and I certainly think it’s the case that many conference topics repeat the same subject matter year on year – but this is not necessarily a bad thing. A show of hands in answering “who’s a first-timer?” at a conference usually results in a large proportion of hands going up, so there is always a new audience for the same messages. Provided these messages are sound and valuable, then why not repeat them to cover new entrants to the community? What might sound like the same talk/content from a presentation title on a programme could well be very different in content to what it was a decade ago, too. While I’m not familiar with developer conference content, I would imagine that they’re not dissimilar in this area, with some foundational developer topics being mainstays of conference programmes year on year.

I’ve been a regular testing conference delegate since 2007 (and, since 2014, speaker) and noticed significant changes in the “topics du jour” over this period. I’ve seen a move away from a focus on testing techniques and “testing as an independent thing” towards topics like quality coaching, testing as part of a whole team approach to quality (thanks agile), and human factors in being successful as a tester. At developer-centric conferences, I imagine shifts in topic driven frequently by changes in technology/language and also likely shifts due to agile adoption too.

As you may know, I’m involved with organizing the Association for Software Testing conferences in Australia and I do this for a number of reasons. One is to offer a genuine context-driven testing community conference in this geography (because I see that as a tremendously valuable thing in itself) and another is to build conference programmes offering something different from what I see at other testing events in Australia. The recently-released TiCCA19 conference programme, for example, features a keynote presentation from Lynne Cazaly and she is not directly connected with software testing but will deliver very relevant messages to our audience mainly drawn from the testing community.

Reach out

I think most disciplines – be they IT, testing or otherwise – fail to capitalize on the potential to learn from others, maybe it’s just human nature.

At least in the context-driven part of the testing world, though, I’ve seen genuine progress in taking learnings from a broader range of disciplines including social science, systems thinking, psychology and philosophy. I personally thank Michael Bolton for introducing me to many interesting topics from these broader disciplines that have helped me greatly in understanding the human aspects involved in testing.

In terms of broadening our message about what we believe good testing looks like, I agree that it’s generally the case that the more public members of the testing community are not presenting at, for example, developer-centric conferences. I have recently seen Katrina and others (e.g. Anne-Marie Charrett) taking the initiative to do so, though, and hopefully more non-testing conferences will see the benefit of including testing/quality talks on their programmes. (I have so far been completely unsuccessful in securing a presentation slot at non-testing conferences via their usual CFP routes.)

So I think it’s a two-way street here – we as testing conference organizers need to be more open to including content from “other” communities and also vice versa.

I hope Katrina continues to contribute to the testing community, her voice would be sorely missed.

PS: I will blog separately about some of the replies to Katrina’s thread that were specifically aimed at the context-driven testing community.