Expo:QA Conference

We’ve just returned from 10 days in Europe where we attended two conferences. The first was Expo:QA in Madrid. It was our first time at this conference, although the conference has been running for 10 years. We had loads of fun, and highly recommend this conference if you are interested in testing.

We met many interesting people and some GREAT speakers. The conference runs some talks in English and some in Spanish and have live translation on two of their stages. This was our first experience of being live translated and it was amazing to watch! We have huge respect for the translators. It also allowed us to attend a Spanish talk and understand it, what an awesome way to see how the same ideas have spread across multiple languages.

We attended a talk by Ana María García(@amgarciao) about Walking Dead Testing. It was fantastic, she really gets the agile testing mindset and whole team approach, plus her slides had lots of zombie pictures ☺ – here are her awesome slides!

We ran a half-day agile testing workshop that went very well. Here are our slides:

Augusto Evangelisti(@augeva) invited us to attend his workshop on BDD, which was very enjoyable. I loved how he separated thinking about the test cases (Discuss) from writing them in BDD syntax (Distill). It was the first time I’d been introduced to this model, and found people understood it more easily than when I have just taught them the BDD syntax of Given, When, Then. I’ll definitely be using this approach in future. Below are Sam’s sketchnotes from the session.

One of the conference activities was a walking tour of Madrid one evening, followed by tapas. This was a great way to see Madrid and also to get to meet some other conference attendees. I really enjoyed it, unfortunately Sam was sick so she gave it a miss.

The opening keynote was by David Evans(@davidevans66), taking about the Pillars of Agile testing. It was an entertaining talk (although I seemed to be one of the few laughing out loud). David, I guess only I enjoyed your venn diagram ☺ Sam drew a new version of David’s Pillars for him.

Our talk on the Agile Testing Mindset also went really well. In fact it was rated as the third best talk of the conference ☺ High praise indeed given the quality of the talks. Thanks @JJCannegieter for keeping us informed 🙂

Unfortunately we missed many of the other great talks since we were heading to Switzerland for POCampCH, but we kept following along on twitter and it seemed everyone had loads of fun.