My First Agile Testing Days: Four Years Later

After years of getting rejected, the talk I submitted to Agile Testing Days in 2017 finally got me accepted. It was such a privilege and an honor to meet so many of the people I'd only know from the internet. Reading through my notes now, much of what I wrote down has become engrained into how I go about my work everyday. What a blessing it was to encounter the people I needed to learn from in my career at the time I needed to learn from them. I'm glad to see how routine their wisdom has become for me.

• Lisi Hocke gave a talk about growth. I've since seen more of her talks and prepared a workshop with her; I see how she embodies this in her approach to the world.
• Gitte Klitgaard reminded me that believing in people will allow them to be better. Stay curious about why people are doing what they do before placing judgment.
• Kim Knup spoke about a zero bug policy (not any bugs in your backlog). I was not ready to hear this message at the time, having come from places with years-old products and tens or hundreds of bugs in the backlog. But now I see exactly what she was describing: the psychological relief that comes from less time in JIRA and fewer meetings about priorities.
• Katrina Clokie pulled up Noah Sussman's reimagining of the testing pyrmaid (lots of small tests, fewer large ones) upside-down as a bug filter. And suddenly, it clicked for me.
• Alex Schladebeck and Huib Schoots challenged me to think on a meta-level about the testing I was doing, to name the skills and techniques I was using. It would help me as I spent the following years sharing exploratory testing skills with other testers.
• Emily Webber spoke about building trust on teams. I find myself recommending the team manual she developed to somebody about once a month, plus she helped spark an idea for a future conference talk I developed.
• Liz Keogh gave me the words I needed to build a safe-to-fail environment for my team members, where failure is an expected, inevitable part of complex systems.

I realized in compiling this blog post that I'd already written about Agile Testing Days just one month after I'd attended in 2017. At that point, I was looking specifically at regression testing advice, which is what I was in the thick of at work. What am I in the thick of now, and when will it become clear to me?