The first Vienna Tester Gathering finally took place on Feb 28 2013.
I was not quite sure what to expect because except 1 person all attendees where current work colleagues or ex work colleages of mine. Nevertheless I did not just want to meet and hang around. So I thought the Lean Coffee meeting format would be suitable.
And it really went well in my opinion. With overseeable 6 people we came up with 6 topics to discuss. The interesting thing was that one person did not really have a testing background. Despite this fact he was an enrichment to the meet up.
So here is a short list of the 6 topics we discussed – time boxed to 10 minutes per card.
- Customer expectation management
- Multi platform testing
- Can and/or should a testing expert influence business decisions
- Exploratory Testing
- Social Media success – how to direct people to get the right information
- Unit Tests – Where to start and where to stop?
It was my first proper Lean Coffee and I was quite amazed how much you can discuss when you follow some simple guidelines – in our case a timebox of 10 minutes per card. I think in these 60 minutes we shared more information and knowledge compared to some standard meetings where discussions lead to nowhere for hours.
The next step could be to introduce the Lean Coffee format at my workplace to run better meetings.
