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Agile Testing Days 2018 – Thursday – ‘Not Yet’ talk, Agile Unicorn Talks & WiT

This year, at AgileTD, Thursday was a busy day. Anne-Marie Charrett started it off with a wonderful keynote on Quality. I wrote about Anne-Marie in one of the previous posts on this years AgileTD. She has been an incredible inspiration throughout my career since I first saw her speak two years ago. She’s also the very first person I ever sketchnoted live! Enjoy this sketchnote of her keynote.

Morning Keynote – Anne-Marie Charrett – Is Your Quality on the Road to Nowhere

This morning, I got to take to the stage and debut my new talk “The Power of ‘Not Yet'”. Such an honour to see a massive crowd and a large number of friendly faces in the audience. The talk was recorded and shown again later that afternoon. That was intimidating and felt like a great honour. This was the first time I sketchnoted my slides specifically for this talk. It was a fun experiment to do and interesting to see how far I’ve come in confidence in drawing as I had conceived of the idea of handsketching my slides years ago but dismissed it as an unfeasible idea. I love that my talk discusses that very topic: have the confidence to learn and you will be able to do whatever you ever dared to imagine.

The Power of ‘Not Yet’ – Improve Your Testing Skills

There’s Nothing You Can’t Learn

Dream big. You are capable of more than you can imagine – once you can imagine it

In this ever-changing industry, we are constantly challenged to learn new techniques, roles and languages to stay afloat. It can be intimidating and get exhausting to try and keep up, yet it’s highly rewarding too. There are many ways of learning, and they all start with your individual choice to expand your horizon.

Are you a technical tester? Or an agile tester? Or a developer? Or are you predominantly business focused? Or do you have the power to be all of them combined? A difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset to learning is the difference between saying: “I don’t know” and “I don’t know yet”.

We would all love to believe we employ a growth mindset always, but in reality, we often fluctuate between them depending on the context. Often enough, I firmly believed I could learn and still sabotaged myself by remaining in a fixed mindset and choosing the safety of what I know over the uncertainty of that which stretches me. In this talk, I will share my journey and experiences, demonstrate the importance of different role models, and share concrete tips to keep challenging yourself to adapt, take the plunge and acknowledge: ‘not yet, but soon!’

I want to thank everyone for all your wonderful responses. I feel grateful for anyone who came up to me and shared how my talk affected them. I hope it inspired you to continue your own learning journey. I also absolutely loved that I got to teach sketchnoting the day before and got rewarded by seeing so many sketchnotes of my own talk. It feels marvelous.

Find more responses to my talk here

Afternoon Keynote – Faiza Yousuf – Agile Transformation With Remote Teams

Faiza Yousuf was one of the people I was most looking forward to meeting. She is a force for good in Pakistan: she is a founder for Women in Tech Pakistan and co-runs a coding programme for young girls in Pakistan. It was such a pleasure meeting her in person and talking with her throughout the conference. Her confidence, humbleness and inspiration is marvelous to watch and experience. She traveled to Germany for the first time for AgileTD and shared her transformation stories. Having her talk about her work and content of her work was powerful and educational. Her open & honest way in approaching organizations and reality in viewing transformation processes and coaching people along are a way that I hope to be able to do my work and approach people to. Thank you Faiza for traveling the distance and sharing your stories.

Agile Unicorn Talks

In the afternoon, the Agile Unicorn Talks saw their debut at Agile Testing Days. The Agile Unicorn Tracks originated from a tweet-response thread after me and my colleagues shared our AgileTD 2017 learnings to our colleagues via a Pecha Kucha style track. Based on the many responses, I emailed Uwe who promptly put it on the programme. Thank you Uwe & AgileTD organizers for being daring enough to experiment!

The Agile Unicorn Talks are talks of six-and-a-half-minutes-plus-one-seconds long. Speakers get 17 slides that are automatically advanced every 23 seconds. Include at least 3 unicorns for bonus points. The Unicorn Talks are meant to inspire, educate and entertain. I am grateful to all the speakers who dared to take up the challenge! It was a pleasure to introduce you on stage and for all the new speakers among you: it was an honour to facilitate your conference speaking debuts! A large round of applause of all these brave speakers, please! Uros Stanisic with ‘The Power of Demo’. Klaartje van Zwoll with ‘We Can’t All Be Gandalf’. Rick Tracy with ‘T-Shaped Testing or How to Crucify Your Co-Workers’. Mor Korem with ‘What It Means to Be a Testing Unicorn’. Raye Ann Hurst with ‘Testing Like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT)’. Guna Petrova with ‘How to Train a Unicorn’. Meike Mertsch with ‘The Saga of a Swedish Warship’. Martijn Nas with ‘Unicorn vs Team’. Finally, because I believe in always being willing to take up challenges I set others: I closed the Agile Unicorn Track with my ‘Tester Who?’ talk.

Evening Keynote – Lanette Creamer – Test Like a Cat

I had the pleasure of watching & sketchnoting Lanette’s talk before at European Testing Conference. Lanette continuously improves her presentations so it was fun to see how it changed and sketchnote it again!

Late Evening Keynote – Gitte Klitgaard – Feeling Safe To Be Uncomfortable

Gitte and I met at TestBash Netherlands 2017 for the first time and I have been fortunate to meet up and talk with her frequently since. She’s inspirational, authentic and always encouraging me to practice self care. Gitte’s keynote preceeding the Women and Allies evening centred on feeling safe to be uncomfortable. She shared her personal story. It was a powerful keynote rewarded by a well-deserved standing ovation.

Anne-Marie Charrett & Gitte Klitgaard led the Women & Allies evening that evening. Through a safe, open space format, they offered a low key atmosphere in which we could discuss and listen to a multitude of different topics. I loved being there this night. Thank you all.

Published by Marianne Duijst

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