Conference

In January 2015, the Black Ops Testing Team (of which I form part) presented a one day workshop in London at Skills Matter.

The Black Ops Workshop are very hands on. We believe that people learn best when testing, so we have them test.

Each of the Black Ops Team, will have tested the target application prior to the workshop, so we know some target areas, and we have experience of testing the application in different ways.

1. Keynote: Helping Testers Add Value to Agile Projects
2. Tutorial: Technical Testing in an Agile Environment
3. Workshop: Black Ops Testing

Keynote: Helping Testers Add Value to Agile Projects

I presented the closing keynote to the conference.

Blurb

Every Agile project is different, we know this, we don’t do things ‘by the book’ on Agile projects. We learn, we interact, we change, we write the book we go along. Throughout all of this, testing needs to remain viable, and it needs to add value. Remaining viable in this kind of environment can be hard.

At Oredev 2014 I presented two track sessions:

1. Confessions of an Accidental Security Tester
2. Automation Abstractions: Page Objects and Beyond

Confessions of an Accidental Security Tester

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACCIDENTAL SECURITY TESTER - “I DIDN’T BREAK IN, YOU LEFT THE DOOR OPEN”

“Alan Richardson has stumbled across security issues on a number of live web sites and applications. He didn’t mean to, he was just observing the system at a lower level of detail than other users, and then asked questions about what he saw. In this session he will describe: tools he used, the thought processes he went through, the bugs he found, the processes he went through to raise and pressure the companies to fix, and the extreme lack of rewards and gratitude that he received in the process”

In May 2014, at Let’s Test 2014 I presented two sessions:

• A tutorial on Automation Abstractions
• A workshop on skill aquisition and transfer

Hands on Exploration of Page Objects and Abstraction Layers with Selenium Webdriver Workshop

This made a good change from the ‘beginner’ tutorials, because I think automation abstractions are not well covered online.

I released my code on github.

This could easily be a full day tutorial, but I squeezed it into half a day for Let’s Test, so we went through the material very quickly. If you would like me to conduct this workshop for your team at your office then please contact me.

At StarEast 2014 I presented a Selenium WebDriver tutorial and a lightning keynote.

The Tutorial

The tutorial pre-requisite was the Free Get Started Selenium WebDriver course. This allows everyone to have the basic installs ready so that the tutorial can start quickly.

• The test pages we use on the tutorial: https://github.com/eviltester/seleniumTestPages

Interview

A live interview was also conducted.

Lightning Keynote

I performed a lightning keynote with the title A sense of urgency" or “A sense of readiness”.

At the Test Management Summit 2014. I presented a tutorial and a faciliated session.

The Summit Tutorial Materials

The tutorial was a cut down version of my Hands on Tutorial, with explanations and demos, mainly aimed at managers rather than practitioners.

The Summit Session Materials

The slides I used for the Summit 70 minute discussion are on slideshare here.

December 2013 in Helsinki, at the Software Development Summit 2013, I presented two Keynote talks:

• ‘Experiences of Exploratory Testing in Agile, Testing, Dev and QA’
• ‘My Quest for Silver Bullets’

I was fortunate in being asked to perform a keynote, and asked to fill in for a keynote speaker who unfortunately couldn’t attend, so I did two keynotes. Lucky me.

Experiences with Exploratory Testing in Agile, Testing, Dev and QA

The first was a talk built especially for the event entitled “Experiences with Exploratory Testing in Agile, Testing, Dev and QA”.

December 2013 in London, at the SIGIST Winter 2013 Conference, I was on a panel session with Dorothy Graham, Paul Gerrard and Dr Stuart Reid

The panel session ran with the title “Should Testers Code”

I wrote up my notes on the panel in a blog post

Notes

I attended the SIGIST in December because I was asked to be part of a Panel with the starting discussion title of “Should testers be able to code?”.

The Evil Tester’s Guide to HTTP Proxies and Developer Tools - London Tester Gathering Workshops 2013

In October 2013, at the London Tester Gathering 2013, I presented a half day workshop on HTTP Proxies and Browser Developer Tools.

I started by throwing people in at the deep end. Mainly so they physically ‘feel’ the gaps in their knowledge, or can spot areas they want to work on in the workshop.

Black Ops Testing - London Tester Gathering Workshops 2013

In October 2013, at the London Tester Gathering 2013, I co-presented a full day workshop with Tony Bruce, Steve Green and James Lyndsay. We worked through a simple testing lifecycle using an open source application covering scouting, planning, attacking, tools, and automation.

This was our first time presenting together and it worked well.

Each of us has different experiences of how we approach and model the topics under discussion, so although each of us notionally ’led’ one of the sections, we could each contribute our alternative views and models on the sections and engage in discussion about the topic