My First Experience of The Conference - TestBash Manchester - Part 1/3

I've been attending smaller meetups and gatherings in London, so I was naturally excited to see what a bigger conference had to offer. Thanks to the Guild of Testing at Metaswitch for making it possible for me to attend TestBash Manchester.

This is the first of three posts covering a summary of the conference and my general impressions/thoughts. Warning, this is a long post.

I've imagined conferences to be all about the talks, never anticipated the breaks to deliver an even bigger impact. And wow, was this a place to meet a diverse, welcoming and very interesting group of people. It would be impossible to list everyone I've met and learned from, so I'll not even try, but what I can wholeheartedly recommend is for everyone to seek this experience to grow themselves. Originally, I was a bit lost trying to approach people to talk about specific thing. Scratch that, go and get to know each other. Everything else will follow naturally.

The talks themselves were nonetheless interesting, gripping and a stellar display of individual stories and journeys. I'll not go into too much detail about each, but give a brief description and my takeaway for each one of them. If you're interested approach the Presenters or look for more information on

Quality != Software Testing by Anne-Marie Charrett

In this talk, Anne-Marie offered a dive into how the definition of quality is different for various stakeholders in a project and how that definition might change over time.

Discussed how quality can be deconstructed and approached from looking at the quality of small pieces, grouping them into categories concerning Product, People, Practice and Tools & Technology. Introduced the notion of 'Qualitability' - i.e. how easy it is to know the state of quality at any point in time. And highlighted the need of increasing it such that we can provide visibility as soon as possible.

Presented ways to improve quality, including stepping through the process of Problem > Goal to help solve the problem > Ideas to achieve goal > Actual experiments, tools or practices to use.

Encouraged Quality Practices, such as holding Quality Workshops (where we can interview stakeholders about their perception of quality and their definition of achieving that quality), Swarming (getting on top of suspicions and letting testers explore areas of concern) and Coaching (getting new testers on board and helping other teams to become better at testing). TL,DR: My takeaway - Ask stakeholders what quality means to them, and when is it done. It will change over time!

What I, a tester have learnt from psychology by Göran Kero

In his talk, Göran gave an impression of how psychology can be useful to testers, through a series of examples. As I'm already interested in psychology, I was familiar with most of the described behaviours so tried to come up with an example closely related to testing for each, below is a selection.

Correlation vs Causation - they are NOT the same, the fact that two things correlate, does not mean they are cause and effect. E.g. a performance degradation correlating with a particular check-in does not necessarily mean it was the cause. It could have been a change in the test environment, resource contention, etc. It would need more investigation.

Confirmation Bias - The tendency to favor results that match our prior beliefs. Often happens in testing.. If we believe something is broken we'll not stop until we've proven so. However, the opposite is more dangerous: believing something is 'just fine' can lead to prematurely stopping testing it after discovering some aspects of it are indeed fine.

Automation Bias - Tendency of over-belief in automatic systems. A real danger in testing, if we're blindly believing the results our automated systems provide us without critically viewing them.

Self Efficacy - Belief in the ability to perform behaviours needed to achieve desired outcomes. I.e. "There's no way I can...". Affected/controlled by Personal experiences ("Last time I've tried.."), Observing others ("If they could do it, so can I.."), Verbal persuasion ("It's impossible!"), Emotional Arousal - enthusiasm, anxiety. As testers it can make our job a lot harder or much easier. Be aware and thrive to increase and help others to increase their self-efficacy.

TL, DR: My takeaway - Psychology is great, testing is a human activity. Be aware! To be continued...