As the weeks turn into months and COVID-19 infections continue in many places around the globe, plans for Career Development and conferring with others are transforming to meet the unique challenges.
In this episode, Smita Mishra and Anna Royzman join Matt Heusser and Michael Larsen to talk about ways that conferences and other providers of learning opportunities are coming together to address ways in which to create meaningful learning opportunities and the fact that going to a conference in person and attending a conference online from home are not at all the same thing.
We also bring back the immediate news portion of the show with a quick discussion of both the technology and ethics of contact tracing and happily announce that The Testing Show will be moving to a two-week format starting in July.
Panelists:
References:
- Google employees are told to expect to work from home for the rest of the year, but a select few will be allowed to return to offices as soon as June
- Facebook is the latest major tech company to let people work from home forever
- Apple and Google partner on COVID-19 contact tracing technology
- How an MIT spin-off is using contact tracing to fight COVID-19, and so can you
- “Immunity passports” in the context of COVID-19
- Kitchener/Waterloo Software Quality Conference canceled for 2020
- Test Masters Academy
- Test Leadership Congress, New York
- ConTEST New York City 2020
- Meetup: Ministry of Testing Kansas City
- Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations)
- Workshop on Self education and software testing (WHOSE)
- WHOSE Wiki
Transcript:
Michael Larsen (00:00):
Hello, everybody, and welcome to The Testing Show. Welcome to July, 2020… well, I don’t want to say “welcome to” because it’s still with us and it’s not terribly welcome… we are still actively in the COVID-19 phase of reality. And this phase of reality might be going on for a while (to say the least) and how we’re going about it. And what we’re going to do about it is going to be a continued part of our conversations. But I do want to also announce that there’s a new development that we think some of y’all are going to be very excited about. And that is that this podcast is going to go to two times a month. We ran as a two-times-a-month podcast a few years ago. It was decided that it made sense to do it once a month. And Qualitest has decided they want to give us a shot to do it twice a month again. So yay to that, which means you’ll hear more of us now. Whether or not that’s a good idea is up to the listener :). But with that, we want to say, “Thank you very much for joining us”. My name is Michael Larsen. I am the podcast producer. I’m the one that twiddles the bits and gets you the final thing that you hear. And I’m occasional commentator and loudmouth. We have some guests with us. We’d like to welcome back to the show. Ms. Smita Mishra Howdy, how you doing?
Smita Mishra (01:21):
Hey, Michael. I’m doing good. Thank you so much for having me on the show again.
Michael Larsen (01:26):
And we’d also like to welcome back once again, ms. Anna Royzman. How are you, Anna?
Anna Royzman (01:31):
I’m good. Thank you. Welcome back, I guess, to all of us. I;m excited to hear this show is back on track. This show is back on track with two shows per month.
Michael Larsen (01:42):
So are we. And of course we have our master of ceremonies, regular moderator, pundit du jure… du jure? Is that quite right? I don’t know. Anyway, Matt Heusser… you know, Matt, come on.
Matthew Heusser (01:54):
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the show. Today, we wanted to talk about the reality. We did a COVID show three months ago, and we’re still in it. Restaurants have opened up near me, but by and large, everybody’s still working from home and may be through the rest of the year. Google said that they expect you will be allowed to work from home through the end of the year, your manager can’t pressure you. Facebook has said that you’ll be allowed to work from home forever. That’s the expected new policy, and you’re not expected to ever come back to the office and that’s changing a lot of things. Before we get to that, let’s talk about the virus, COVID, a little bit, and some of the solutions, the technology solutions that have been offered to it. I don’t know, Anna, Smita, how much you’ve heard about this, but there’s some controversy around the privacy and [contact] tracing, which is a mechanism by which you would track everyone you’ve been in contact with when they find out that you have the virus so you can help them figure out if they have the virus. Have you heard about that in India or wherever Anna is now?
Anna Royzman (03:03):
Anna is in New York. Of course I did because it’s on the news. I think that it’s one of those issues that we, as quality assurance professionals have to face all the time. And it’s about the privacy and ethics. It becomes more and more important that technology is becoming unethical and where on the slide that we have to draw to make sure that it doesn’t invade our lives.
Michael Larsen (03:32):
So for those who are listening, we were talking about this prior to jumping on the recording itself. And we were talking about exactly this, the whole idea with there’s development for vaccines, potentially. There’s some promise there. There is some development for technology to help with contact tracing, to be able to determine who has had the virus and be able to trace it back. On one end, there’s the scientific and technological aspects of it and being able to make sure that these work and that we’re doing them so that we can be as effective as possible. On the other hand, you have a number of people with legitimate concerns as to “How is this data going to be used? How are you getting this? Do I get a say as to how this is used?” That’s the next challenge I think we’re going to have to face. On one end, there is technology and technology can absolutely help us, but technology will only help us as much as there are enough people willing to use it for the common good as possible. And if there are enough people who say, “No, I refuse to participate in this”, then that’s going to countermand the ability for it to be effective.
Matthew Heusser (04:42):
Here’s the 30 second version of it. If you have a phone that broadcasts, “Hey, I’m here. Hey, I’m here”, and everyone else has the app, and they’re also broadcasting and you do it over Bluetooth, you connect to that phone. Two weeks later, you find out that you have the virus. You can press a button and you’ve got the contacts of everyone else. And you can send messages to everyone else that you were in contact with that said, “I just found out I have the virus, I’ve been in contact with you over the past two weeks. Maybe you should go see a doctor”, and it can be over Bluetooth. It’s serverless. No one has to know this information but you and the other people. You don’t know who they are. They don’t know who you are. We have the technology to build it and Apple and Google have a protocol together… it is Apple and Google… to enable companies to build applications on top of this protocol, using this technology, and with that level of permission. There is another project put out by MIT that is very similar, except they want to be able to aggregate the data and then turn that over to help information officers at various levels. So your County health department, for example, could see a map of where these people are going and could say, “Wow, the J.C. Park is like the super hot bed of the COVID. That’s a public area. We can put notices out.” We can shut the park down, If we feel that strongly and go to the mayor and we can make very pointed quarantine actions designed for the public interest that are limited. Instead of shutting down all restaurants, we can find the corridor. That was just a strip. It’s a real popular one, where everybody goes cruising on Friday nights and shut that down to take much more pointed strategic action to stop the thing. And the idea of someone else has my health data. Even if it’s anonymized is scary to some people. That’s, I think where the unethical comes from. So I wanted to ask Anna as I’ve described it, can you help me understand what’s unethical about any of this so far?
Anna Royzman (06:48):
Well, number one is what you mentioned. The data. Number two is this data is involving certain decisions. For example, you just mentioned the park. What if it’s somebody place to work? What if it’s somebody’s house? What does it mean for people? What if you go to a private party and then this information becomes known? I’m not sure that we, as a society, have the necessary ways of behaving to protect people’s privacy necessarily. That’s why.
Matthew Heusser (07:22):
That’s a good point. The MIT project does have the ability for you to mark… don’t know if it’s based on how much time you spend at the location, but basically it doesn’t report home. And I don’t think it reports workplace.
Anna Royzman (07:36):
But then maybe it’s useless because it has so much limitations
Matthew Heusser (07:42):
Well, that’s the same protocol we’ve used for [contact] chasing for a hundred years. You list all the people that you know, you list all the places that you’ve been, and they exclude your house and your place of business. That’s just how it’s been done for years. And there’s some scientific data that it’s effective. Now wouldn’t that be more effective if you had your phone? If you had Bluetooth contacts with everyone who actually were close enough to come in contact with.
Smita Mishra (08:06):
Yeah. Just wanted to add a quick piece here. While… I mean, it’s like you’re all in the same storm, but as they say, we don’t have the same boats. So it may be a little different for different geographies, how we’re dealing with it. If you look at it in totality, it’s a new world that we are heading towards. We haven’t seen a situation like COVID in the past. Both Michael and you, Matt, mentioned that it’s going to be community versus individual. Are you going to think of it as an individual? Because frankly you’re not safe. If you just want to think that I am safe, I’m going to be safe and remain safe throughout. You are only going to be safe if the community surrounding you is going to be safe. Technology, while I always joke around that these are problems created in labs, maybe, so maybe labs will create a solution, so we have to wait for the vaccines and the medicines. I’m hopeful that people are more receptive to these things, but technology is surely offering a good solution. I think contact tracing, one of the biggest challenge that has come up with apps around contact tracing is that okay, it’s personally identifiable information, which is available, which is a total parse. A lot of these apps, at least I can say that for the app that was used in Korea and the app that’s being used in India. No, it doesn’t contain your PII. It has to have more direct information with an additional layer of encryption and the way you save it for how long you save that information. What do you do with that informationonce the person you have the data about is already out of this danger, are you kind of deleting their entire geospatial data? I think those things, if they are taken care of, the data is actually shared more with health officials, the governments, the departments who are actually responsible for the community welfare, I think it’s safer. You don’t want to give away all these informations to private parties, to misuse for any reason. You can’t avoid it either. You can keep saying, I am not going to be on it because we are heading towards a world where I would like to see the health passport of everybody around us. So there is going to be a concept of health passports somewhere. I’m not going to be comfortable visiting a restaurant or a place where the frequency of red zoned people or infected people is higher. It’s in the benefit of the community and ultimately you, or as an individual to have these technologies and use them.
Michael Larsen (10:35):
I like it.
Matthew Heusser (10:35):
Great points, Smita, thank you. And I think it’s sort of balanced. What we wanted to talk about. The contact tracing for a bit, as COVID’s in the news because it’s the reality that we all have to deal with. Today though, since we’re stuck at home, one of the conferences that I really try to get to every single years, the Kitchener/Waterloo Software Quality Conference. The audiences are incredibly receptive. They give you good feedback. They look for a reason to understand where you’re coming from instead of a reason to tell you why you’re wrong. It’s super open to new speakers. I’m just a big fan. And it got canceled this year. I’ve got this block of time where I wasn’t planning on doing billable work and I’m looking for other ways to continue to grow and develop myself and hopefully, frankly, to make some new connections and meet some new, interesting people. A bunch of other conferences I might consider have also been canceled. Now I know Anna was running a conference in New York and I also… as I alluded to earlier, she just travels a lot. Like, I’ll try to get in touch with her and she’ll be like, “yeah, I got five minutes day after tomorrow. I’m in Scotland. I’m in Russia. I’m in Italy. I’m in Greece.” Just amazing. So you’ve kind of figured out the radical remote nomad life. I’d really like to hear what you’ve been up to lately.
Anna Royzman (11:59):
Thank you. I do love to travel and I do work from home and I run my conferences from home. And if you guys don’t know what I do, I run Test Masters Academy. As part of what we do is running two conferences in New York, which was the story for the last six years, but not this year because in New York this year, we cannot really run the conference yet. The New York area is not open for physical contact for a hundred people. We are in phase two right now. My conference, which is called Test Leadership Congress, was intended for test leads and managers. It’s really small. It’s a peer conference in a way that people who present and people who attend are in the same positions. They learn from each other. And the major part of this conference is interruptions, networking, discussions, finding solutions together. A lot of those things I have not seen online yet. When I started thinking about the conference, what to do with it and how to transfer this format of interactions, mentorships, idea sharing, solution finding, to online, I looked at the conferences as the turning online for like two or three days conference, probably not in your time zone. I just found that it just doesn’t work for my conference. This format doesn’t work. What I’m seeing, and I try to participate in several online conferences, is I can maybe participate one hour out of three days and probably a story of all of you out there. We did try. But when you’re staying home, it’s not free time for you. It’s work. It’s family, kids, any other commitments, it’s not really something that you can allocate three full days of participating in online conference. That’s really not a reality, but I’m seeing a lot of conferences, “Oh, we don’t care, we have content, and we just serve this content and you just tune in whenever”. And what I’m hearing is there was no interactions. There was no people talking to each other. I feel that something that I really want to change, I came up with a different format. It’s experimental. So I don’t really know how it’s gonna happen. We’re spreading the conference in chunks over five weeks. We aligned for a lot of interactive sessions, but we understand that conference really cannot have like a half a day, a full day block from people’s calendar. This is not the reality. They will not participate and participation is what we’re looking for. Instead we’re spreading that into chunks, two, three hours a day, you can come in and participate, in “meet the speaker”, or you can participate later and listen to the speaker. But our major focus will be on mentoring and on interruptions and on solutions. A lot of workshops, a lot of discussions and a lot of mentoring. This is what I try to achieve with this new format. So the content, the presentations itself will be just part of the conference. I would say it’s like one half of it, but the second half is interactions between participants and finding the solutions together. The conference starts in three weeks. I call it the summer season. My tickets are called season pass. You probably know what season pass means. If you go to amusement park, the season pass means you can come in any day you want, and you can enjoy it any day you want. With your family, with your friends, by yourself. This is the concept that I want to transfer to my conference. To me, it’s more like it’s a summer camp, a club and a conference together.
Matthew Heusser (16:07):
What’s the name of the web page People should be going to, to learn more about that?
Anna Royzman (16:10):
Start with test masters academy.org, and you will find information about my conferences. There is another conference that I run, which is in November, the end of November in New York, it’s called ConTEST NYC. And as of right now, I want to do it hybrid. I’m just telling you guys, I didn’t announce it yet, but this is what we agreed with our speakers and organizers. The hybrid is a different way of a conference. It’s not online, it’s streaming. It’s open to people from across the globe, but certain sessions will be streaming. Some people can actually participate in physical events. It’s not going to be a big event, but my conferences are never big events. So don’t worry about it. It’s not a thousand people, never. At max, I had a hundred and fifty. It’s still a very small conference. And of course all the health guidelines that are imposed by the health organizations and the States will be enforced. But this is what we’re going to try to do, a hybrid in November.
Matthew Heusser (17:20):
So thank you, Anna. And I’m really open to all kinds of professional development. Conferences are one which mostly shut down. They’re moving to online. It’s great to hear about how you guys are structuring it. I’ve had a lot of success just going to Meetups, cause now every meetup in the world, meetup.com, they’re mostly free and you can just go to them. So I went to like meetup, Kansas city or something awhile back for software testing. Cause it is just through my laptop, which I could not have done four months ago. I’m curious. I know in India, there’s a few major hubs, but transportation between hubs can be more challenging. What’s your perspective on this, Smita?
Smita Mishra (17:58):
Yeah, I was about to add to what Anna said that particularly for her kind of sessions, especially if it is going to be more about leadership and coaching it could be a little tricky because my creating any of the existing in person trainings or coaching programs to an all digital format, it’s such efforts, they have to go beyond just applying the existing technology solutions to offer virtual classrooms and all of it. But they have to represent a more fundamental rethinking of the whole learning experience to enable collaborative, interactive, social learning experience for all the group of learners. And one has to recognize that there are limits to what can be addressed when using virtual live sessions, such as webcasts or virtual classrooms and video and audio conferences. For example, you have such platforms, then they may not work very well for deep social, emotional interpersonal skill building stuff. But then you have to address and consider what you can do before, during or after the session to maximize its impact. Putting all of this together as a person from India in Delhi and seeing so much of software testing events happening all across the globe, and definitely a lot of it in India. Also, I have this small theory that especially for the commercial events, which are not, not for profit. I think the market has shifted from the Organizer’s Market to Speaker’s Market. A speaker had to really see how much is the travel cost. Am I getting the cost for accommodation, for travel? What am I getting paid? How much is my time? That’s going to take in to deliver one hour session or three hours workshop. Now I think there are so many events happening. The cost of the speaker to participate is lower. And so the speaker has a choice to really pick and choose the conferences that they are more keen to be part of than considering the cost limitations as a speaker. That’s the take I am thinking of. As a participant, surely it’s a boon to have so many events again at the same time, how is the learner’s end to end experience going to be much like a designer would think that you have to set priorities for those objectives and make sure that your attendees achieve those even virtually?
Michael Larsen (20:15):
I think something that would be a good… I’m circling back here, because a lot of what Anna was saying about the restructuring of conferences and not just looking at virtual versus in-person and such… Having gone through this process myself as a presenter, I recently did a conference in which I was presenting to a camera and no interaction. I talked to my slides. I talked to my material and worked through it. It was disjointed. I’ll be honest. When I deliver a talk, I look to the crowd. I to see am I registering with somebody and I’ll be able to adjust in real time when you’re speaking to the void, that’s difficult to do. So what I think might be a valuable approach and, hey, out there, conferences. Free consult! My point being maybe it might make sense to say, “Hey, at X amount of time, we’re going to do a recording and this recording will be available and then say maybe 24 hours later, or maybe a week later or something else, another time could come in and maybe not even a time, it just could be something like, “Hey, if you want to participate in Michael Larsen’s conversation about testability, it’s going to be an Ask Me Anything”. And you can send in your questions based off of what you saw. That way you could say, “Hey, I have questions about your material. What about this? How about this context?” And then I could come back and go, “Oh, Hey, good point. I mentioned this in the talk, but you brought up something I didn’t consider. So let’s expand on that a little bit.” And that gets added to the presentation. In other words, just like Anna was saying the idea of a summer camp, you know, you’re not just presenting one time and then that’s it. It’s something that you can continually, or at least for a limited period interact with. And it’s not just a, “Hey, here’s a very limited scope view of it. And if you didn’t happen to catch it, Oh well.” So I think there might be a good hybrid possibility there.
Anna Royzman (22:09):
Michael, thank you so much. That’s exactly what we were thinking. Exactly. And that’s exactly what we implementing the, ask me anything later, we actually offering two sessions two times for the session to be presented. We’re going to record it. And then we have this ask me and you’re saying exactly for the reasons. I’m so happy. You just said it.
Matthew Heusser (22:32):
Let’s talk about what works for online training and what doesn’t. Smita surprized me there when she said social interactions. I think it’s very challenging to build meaningful relationships with this kind of online format. Doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It’s a lot harder. There’s no bar where you can kind of sit around late at night and talk and learn personalities that you might have at a different event. One thing that I think is better is genuine skill development. I mean, we’ve all been in those one day tutorials for Jenkins, for performance testing or whatever it is. The lecturer has to kind of go with the speed of the class. And if you fall behind, you’re done and you get a good conceptual overview, but you don’t leave with the ability to actually use the tool. I was at a Hadoop tutorial where like, all I did was install it and then run the simplest of queries. But I think with the online format, you can watch the video once and see the instructor do it. And then you can watch it a second time and follow along and pause it and get caught up. And if you get stuck, because there isn’t some dependency, you can contact someone and talk one-on-one and figure out the dependency and rerun it. And in terms of learning how to do SQL or stand up a particular kind of microservice or install a unit test framework and actually do unit testing or learn new programming language, I think those are all really good online. As long as it’s step, step, step, step, step, step do, and doesn’t require any particular creativity. A lot of testers lack negotiation skills. They lack assessment skills. They lack writing skills. Test reports. How do I communicate in 45 seconds the status of the product? I think that could be taught online. I think that’s a different kind of social interaction than Smita meant, though.
Smita Mishra (24:28):
Yeah. With this whole professional development, whether the format is the conference or an event or a training video or something, we could broadly classify them into either being experiential or being more like a coaching, mentoring relationship or being instructional. My point there was that when we come to the experiential part where it is more about learning through doing certain tasks and trying to learn each other better and trying to learn from each other more, those kinds of things are going to be little more tricky. That could include soft skill that could include some of the technical very fine technical stuff too. But then if we go at the other end, which is totally instructional, like you said, your Hadoop video, I think those things are going to be fundamentally changed forever. I don’t see a reason now why that was ever an offline thing. Like you can totally do that on line and maybe they will forever be online now, once even the COVID era is over, they’ll be certain kinds of professional development courses, which will forever stay online, especially the instructional part, but the experiential or the coaching or mentoring part, It’s going to be still a bit more tricky. If somebody is attempting to have such a course being done, then I would think that they will have to make sure that there are many more interactions built into those courses. At the same time, they are a priority to the speaker for the conference and the participant, all of them put together.
Anna Royzman (26:05):
I want to add to it if possible. The part of the work that we do with the conference format is offering tutorials online and again, I have talked to several coaches who are already doing online training and online facilitation. I learned from them very interesting things. Group work actually is sometimes easier online. If you give people tools to interrupt and collaborate. What I heard from the coaches is that if you put people in the breakout room and give them some stuff to discuss, they form in groups easier online than they do it in physical, you know, sometimes physically you may have distance from different people, but once you are in the virtual room, it could be easier to connect. So that’s a promising thing.
Matthew Heusser (27:09):
That’s a great way to look at it. Anna, thank you. Before we go, if there’s anything that we haven’t talked about yet that you’re working on or you want to talk about, I’d love to hear about it. Smita, what are you working on that’s new and exciting?
Smita Mishra (27:23):
Interestingly, I have developed this interest towards sustainability. So while I have not been participating in a lot of testing events of late, I have gone to a couple of trainings for understanding how you report them, how you map them. Currently, I am now well equipped to look at a business and evaluate its supply chain or product building methods or any kind of business process and tell them what are the natural sustainable development goals that their business aligns with, which is an interesting place to be currently, STGs are more driven by United Nations. And it’s more like touching all kinds of problems. There are 17 goals and they touch from hunger, zero hunger to no power. T-two goes to the climate changes and building sustainable cities, having clean oceans and having peace. I now work with enterprises, mostly startups and small and medium businesses. A couple of them are large enterprises. Also where I actually map their business processes to these STGs. And then I tell them that, okay, these are your five SDGs where you can actively contribute as you’re working towards your business as usual, you don’t have to do it separately. And then think, how do I contribute to society? You can actually adopt more sustainable practices in your business. So that’s what I’m doing and learning more about it and I’m practicing more of it. So if anybody of you wants to learn how you can be more sustainable as a business, adopt more sustainability, I would say, then please feel free to contact me.
Matthew Heusser (29:02):
Okay. Thank you. Smita Michael, you already alluded to some accessibility stuff that might be becoming public. I don’t know if that’s public enough for you to get into here yet.
Michael Larsen (29:12):
So again, one of the things that has been of interest to me as of late, and I’ve actually been going through revamping my space, you know, my office space and everything that I’m working on for recording purposes and presentation purposes, because one of the things that I want to do because of talking about this new way of doing presentations, this new way of… cause I’ve done a lot of talks over the past decade and I’d kinda like to go back and revisit those, so one of the things that I’m going to do, and besides if I make it public, I have to follow up on it, right? And that is I’m going to bring TESTHEAD to YouTube and also possibly to Twitch and some other platforms so that I can actually practice this. Granted, some of it might be a little rudimentary and some of it might be a little on the embarrassing side, but I’ve never been really afraid of that. If I was afraid of that, I would have never become a performing musician. Besides the point though, that is something that I am actively looking to do. And being able to put some of this stuff together from this perspective is exactly going to be that. I’ve always been a champion of the idea of learning in public, which means don’t necessarily wait until you have something perfect, but experiment with something that you feel is valuable and useful. And if it’s a little bit quirky, that’s okay, because as long as you keep improving on it, you’re going to be able to work with it. So my point being is that I am going to be launching a YouTube channel dedicated to that crash test dummy you love to see from that avatar of mine actually doing things, sharing some of the talk points, some of the examples and ways that you can interact with it. And possibly also bringing it to platforms like Twitch. And this will give me the impetus to actually make that happen. So watch this space.
Anna Royzman (31:13):
We’re watching. Good luck, Michael.
Matthew Heusser (31:15):
Great, thanks, Michael. As for me, I’ve got a couple of one thing that I’ve noticed is that increasingly during Coronavirus, my Gmail is what my integrated development environment used to be when I was a programmer, in that I get work in there. I report on status through there. I live in my email system, which happens to be Gmail, which is optimized for productivity, but spam… it’s also one of the worst distractors I’ve ever seen. My brain doesn’t feel like working. Maybe I’ll check my email. There’ll probably be something in there that I can screw around with for 10 minutes instead of working. At the end of the day, how much time have I spent on email? Too much! So I’m working on a two part series for Tech Republic… One is on Gmail tips and the other one’s Gmail techniques, specifically things like Inbox Zero, they’re mind hacks to get you out of your email and back to your work. Because so little of what I do… The work still needs to get done. We’d actually do the things that benefit the clients. The email is just the communications piece. So that’s coming out. It should be out by the time this show is out. I think it’s going to be helpful. I didn’t know that if you use Yahoo or anything, you can hook that into Gmail and you can look at it through a Gmail interface. So if you have a personal account and a business account and spam account, you can look at all of them through Gmail, then you can optimize your behavior patterns to push things. I got emails that come in all the time that I have to look at occasionally that aren’t that important. I can push those into a tag or folder. And then we look at them once or twice a day. And that defeats the “I’m bored. Maybe I’ll check email” monster. I don’t know if you guys have it, but it’s not good. I do. I’m getting rid of it. Any final thoughts?
Smita Mishra (<arel=”nofollow” href=”https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/Edit?token=7RkSaAUYUP1n0wZID9VREcVG7cP7UTHBKknBuP1le9jaYoAJWupEgmuIIJnqJPjY_wjaiTQoupZUJW6F6szByXrRIbI&loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=1987.12″>33:07</arel=”nofollow”>):
Because testing is life as usual for me. So maybe I skipped this part to add, but I’ve been observing a lot of trends and a lot of changes and upcoming needs for people. I think one of my observation was that as I was going to a lot of tweets, I realized that testers are particularly bored of solving the same problems for 10 years. It’s like having the same conversation, rather. I wouldn’t say solving the same problem, but having the same conversation around testing. Around test automation. One of the things that I’m observing is new things coming up. I wish there was more close clubs like we used to have earlier to discuss upcoming trends and also to discuss how a particular person is wanting to offer a solution. For example, you are coming up with something on Gmail hacks and [Michael] is coming up with the Twitch or YouTube channel. I want to come up with something on what are the problems that we need to really solve in testing to have a comprehensive list of problems, look at who can solve them and get them solved. Those problems are not individual problems, but more like industry problems. What are we really struggling with? Yeah. If you guys are up to it, it would be great to have a club that can again start discussing about the specific issues and offering solutions and helping people solve them.
Matthew Heusser (34:29):
That brings up a great point. I don’t know how long ago it was Michael. It was like eight years ago. We did the workshop on self-education and software testing, which is a great resource to educate yourself online. We made like an 80 page book that eventually became a Wiki as the best way to sort of cross link a bunch of different skills and how to teach yourself those skills. You can Google for it, or we can put it in the show notes, but you’re right, Smita, in that I have maybe a hundred different canned answers. If you’ve been on the show long enough, you’ve heard half of them about test automation or how to deal with the unreasonable boss or how to get behavioral change to happen in an organization. If I have the life energy, it’d be a really cool book, but there might be an opportunity to use these online platforms to do something bigger and better with more people. So if you want to start that conversation, I think that’d be awesome.
Michael Larsen (35:25):
All right. I think that would be a good place for us to put a pin in it. For those who want to follow on with what we might be talking about next, I would recommend listen in in about two weeks. That’s when the next episode of the testing show will be back up. We’re excited to be coming back again to twice a month and we look forward to chatting with you again soon.
Matthew Heusser (35:48):
Thanks, Michael. Thanks Smita. Thanks, Anna.
Anna Royzman (35:50):
Thank you.
New Speaker (35:52):
Thank, Matt, Anna and Michael.
