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Agile Testing Days 2018 – Wednesday – Sketchnoting Adventures

The second full conference day meant that I would be offering my Sketchnoting Adventures workshop in the afternoon. This also meant I was not able to see as much of the conference, being on the programme myself for a large part of the day. I decided early on that I would attend the keynotes and not much else during this day.

At WeTest 2018 last month in New Zealand, I had the pleasure of spending time with Selena Delesie and get to know her better. Her stories resonate with me; she is marvelous, gets to the heart of things quickly and leads by example.

Morning Keynote – Selena Delesie – The Heart of Innovation

I needed some rest to prepare myself for my full afternoon workshop session, so I enjoyed the morning in my room resting and taking a break. It’s a hard thing to do at a busy conference like this, yet with 11 different tracks happening at any one time, it is impossible to see everything anyways. So, this year, I tried to take more rest along the way.

Afternoon Keynote – Ashley Hunsberger – Transforming Culture with DevOps Principles

Thank you Ashley for your inspiring keynote. Thank you for your honesty and vulnerability. Thank you for your wonderful company and conversations.

Sketchnote Adventures

I love sketchnoting. It helps me listen more attentively, focus on what I want to remember and makes me proud to share my notes. It has been my honour and pleasure this year to have been able to share my experiences with sketchnoting and inspire new sketchnote artists to take up the craft. Agile Testing Days gave me the opportunity to run a 3 hour long workshop entitled “Sketchnoting Adventures: Improve Your Notetaking Skills”. I was so pleased to see how many people are intrigued enough by this method of notetaking to spend their entire afternoon with me & since then have been sharing their sketchnotes enthusiastically. Thank you! (Also: shoutout to Meike who helped me set up everything from flipboards to helping me get my pens downstairs in time).

The content/teaser for my workshop:

Sketchnoting Adventures: Improve Your Notetaking Skills

A hands-on journey to visualization and listening

Ready. Steady. Draw! Listen. Brainstorm. Visualize. Experiment & Share.

Sketchnoting is a creative way of taking notes of talks, trainings and meetings. Through a unique combination of text and graphics, sketchnotes highlight the core of the sessions, focus your attention and allow you to communicate ideas more quickly and widely. Visualisation helps wonders when brainstorming new ideas, such as test charters, product creation or retrospectives. There’s something about seeing your and your team’s ideas beautified on the page that really sparks your imagination and wild ideas.

Luckily, you do not need to be an artist or a creative genius to harness the power of sketchnotes. Join me on this hands-on journey to improve your notetaking skills. Put pen to paper and experiment. Improve your attentive listening. Allow yourself time to slow down in order to speed up. Expand your visual library and combine visuals with text. Choose your constraints and dare to share your work. Learn how to harness the power of sketchnotes and visualisation in office.

This workshop is suitable for everyone who is willing to experiment regardless of artistic skill.

I am so proud to see the sketchnotes that the participants drew. Some allowed me to film their final sketchnotes (thank you Hannah for your suggestion!)

 

Some impressions of the workshop:

 

I am so proud of the many sketchnotes made at Agile Testing Days. We ended up making so many, it doesn’t even fit in a Twitter Moment (which apparently is limited to 98 tweets… who knew?). I sincerely hope that people feel inspired enough to keep it up at office and other conferences & trainings. It’s been so encouraging to see the amount of sketchnotes shared immediately rise sharply. Thank you to everyone who came up and showed me their notes, and who proceeded to share them. I love being able to see summaries of talks & trainings I cannot be at myself and learn from reading them. People tell me they love my notes because they are so clear and succinct. Paying it forward is so gratifying! We can uplift each other as a community. See the collection of sketchnotes in the tweet below or through this link.

Rhian Lewis and I met for the first time earlier this year at UKSTAR. She’s a blockchain expert and every time I listen to hear I learn something new. So, despite my tiredness from running the workshop, I really wanted to see her keynote.

Evening Keynote: Rhian Lewis – The Blockchain Paradox

The queues for the food at the Sponsor reception were rather long, and after the intense afternoon, I needed food & to sit down. So, I enjoyed a dinner in the Dorint bar with Eric Roeland for company. Lovely catching up with you Eric and all the best to you. As much as I would have loved to have been at the Games Night, the conversation in the bar was more interesting to me at that moment and after dinner, I needed rest in preparation for the marathon day of Thursday.

 

Published by Marianne Duijst

2 Replies to “Agile Testing Days 2018 – Wednesday – Sketchnoting Adventures”

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