PEST "BOSTON" in MARLBOROUGH

The following was written by Stewart Noakes..

PEST Boston - May ‘07
So here I am in Boston and it’s a beautiful day. Matt and I have just been to see HP, at their amazing campus offices in Marlborough – No I have no idea if this is where the cigarettes come from! – and now its time to get ready for PEST Boston!

This is the first one we have run in the USA, and unfortunately after sending out the invites and getting the tables booked at a local Pub 99 Don St Pierre has had a bit of an aberrant week and can"t make it along and so its me and Matt that are going to entertain and excite people about testing!

Luckily, we have a good crowd – or who knows how it might have ended up !

Great to see our friend from Mentora, Dan Downing who came along and got involved straight away. His stories from similar peer sharing forums really opened up the forum and there were some instant lively discussions.

Chris Reeves from Sepaton, Nancy O’Leary from HP, Mike Raia from Gtech and Nadereh Rooein from Mathworks all joined us for the session and got seriously stuck into the sharing from the start. Some tall, cold beers set the scene and half a dozen platters of appetizers also helped matters along.

Our theme today: How to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of testing. A hard one, as it has so much scope, so we used experience reports from two projects that I worked on to create a focus. We talked about how the supplier relationships, process and controls were used along with the questions we had to ask ourselves and the vendors about demonstrating test effectiveness.

The conversation bubbled and boiled into different areas of thought and experience from across our diverse backgrounds which included a great deal of knowledge about hardware and performance testing – two of my very weakest areas. We also got into the tricky area of how to shape and prioritise testing and of course this led to a session on the basics of Risk Based Testing.

2.5 hours well spent. Our ‘AA’ style of ‘Hi, my name is Stew and I’m a tester!’ (followed by a resounding: Hi Stew !) really worked and everyone was like old friends by the time we finished up.

‘So’, I hear you ask! What did you come out with, other than a nice bar tab?

Well:
That testing problems in the UK (such as deadlines and code that doesn’t work and environments that don’t support a basic smoke test etc) are the same in the US
That Risk Based Testing really can help shape things
Not all testers think about the business, or the value of the product they are helping to bring to market
Static testing really can bring down the cost of the overall project
Offshore resourcing doesn’t always get a positive response in the US
There really are 60,000 ways to present statistics including defect detection profiles that are normalised for tester hours e.g. defect number per tester hour
PEST really is a good format
When you are in charge of marketing you really should take a camera with you everywhere so that you can take pictures of things like groups of people at the first PEST Boston.
That beer and good conversation go together well.

We agreed to do it again next quarter, and I think everyone who attended this time will be back. They are all going to look around the office for a buddy to bring with them. That should make for a bigger group – and we’ll have to think about where we hold the next session as the Pub 99 won't cope well with many more people than we had this time (noisy, hard to always hear).

Most rewarding of all for me from this session is that people went back to work and started talking with their teams about Risk Based Testing, and looking at how to make it work for them. Now that is a result!

Over Q2 there will be PESTS run in:
London – Tony Prosser (Tony.Prosser@TransitionConsulting.co.uk)
Bristol – Richard Morgan (Richard.Morgan@TransitionConsulting.co.uk)
Boston – Don St Pierre (Don.St.Pierre@TCL.US.COM)
Bangalore – Grant Obermaier. (Grant.Obermaier@TransitionConsulting.co.uk)

If you want to get involved with any of these then please speak with the organiser to get a place reserved. I think the theme in Q2 will be: How to improve Defect Removal Efficiency, however it is pretty much the way of these things that anything goes and experience – and particularly experience reports – count for everything. If you have an idea, or a war story to share, then don’t hesitate to get involved. Who knows, you might help someone to do stuff better. You might even learning something yourself!

Remember the point of PEST: None of us is as smart as all of us.

Stew