On Tue May 9th 2023, the biannual TestNet event took place in the Netherlands. A fun day filled with workshops and talks and lots of catching up with old colleagues and fellow testers.
In the morning, I hosted a workshop Teken Mee: Quality Engineering in je Team (In English: Draw With Us: Quality Engineering in Your Team) together with Eveline Moolenaars. In our workshop, we stressed the value of visualization and drawing in a business context, combined with approaches to tackle Quality Engineering challenges. Our participants drew along with us in the early drawing exercises and it’s always fun to see how people start having fun putting pen to paper. The Quality Engineering challenges our participants named were comforting in their commonality: so many of us face similar issues with our teams and companies. There is so much value in realizing we are not unique in our frustrations and so we held space for our participants to learn from and with each other especially.
In the afternoon, I had the pleasure of presenting my talk Whole Team Quality: Making Myself Obsolete to a nice group of people. It’s an experience report of how we truly embraced Whole Team Quality, and like my slide says, I got to tell it as a story. The talk resonated and I enjoyed the conversations afterwards. Thanks also for the nice compliments: “did you really draw the slides yourself?” Yes 🙂 (And it’s fun to see how deliberate practice is paying off as my drawings have improved over the years).
There were a number of interesting talks and workshops at the event, and as usual, I enjoyed the hallway track immensely. It was a pleasure catching up with so many people.
I sketchnoted two sessions. Jurjen Bos‘s keynote Key Management and the Transition to the Cloud (In Dutch) opened the afternoon programme. Jurjen spoke eloquently about cryptography, security and the difficulties in moving to a cloud based solution. As a security and cryptography professional, his work has similarities to testing and he highlighted some of the main challenges and security contexts. It was an interesting look into security, access management and key custodians. Always nice to get a glimpse under the hood of what our financial industry (for one) is build on. Jurjen mentioned it clearly: in his role within security, they sell trust. See my sketchnote below for my summary.
In the afternoon, I also watched Amanda van der Meeren‘s talk Built-In Quality: This is the Way where she shared her tips and tricks on Building In Quality from the start. Amanda’s talk was highly structured and you can read my summary in my sketchnote below:
All in all, a very successful day. I wish to extend my thanks to the following people: Eveline Moolenaars – my fabulous colleague and friend and co-host. Leonie Witteveen – my colleague who made me feel very welcome and who took wonderful photographs of our workshop. Rick Tracy – my old colleague from way back who encouraged me all those years ago to start submitting to conferences and who reminded me of the deadline for this event. Rik Marselis – who handed me the Third Edition of the book Quality for DevOps Teams (I love having books in my bookcase that include my name in it somewhere 🙂 My other Sogeti colleagues and all the other lovely people I met and talked to.
The Autumn event will open its call for papers in August and the event will take place in October. Hopefully, see you there!
