Disclaimer Occasionally I cooperate with TestArmy as Trainer.
TestArmy is the main organizer of TestCamp.

First thing first I would like to formally Apologise to Damian Szczurek for forgetting his name on stage. I am really sorry it wasn’t intentional.

What is TestCamp?

TestCamp is Conference addressed mostly for younger testers still trying find their footing in IT world and our profession. At least that was the idea of the first edition looking at the subject on this one I think this year didn’t have as clearly targeted audience. There was still a lot of beginner level subject, but there were a few more advanced ones. Also, there was a lot of experienced testers in the audience.

How was the conference?

This time I won’t describe a presentation after presentation. I will present my top picks. As far as I am aware they will be available online on testuj.pl youtube channel. So you can watch them yourself.

But first few things about the organization.

Everything was running smoothly, even better then some other conferences but there are 3 things I didn’t like:
THE HUGE PILLAR in the centre of the stage. with poor lighting. That’s why I decided to present outside of the stage. Another thing is there weren’t enough places to leave the plates glasses after taking the snack. And the snack areas basically had choke points at the entrances.

So which presentations I liked?

Nauka na błędach – root cause analysis w praktyce –  Katarzyna Balcerzak had great keynote about root cause analysis. I had to do few of them in past and she had great tips. I liked their no testers approach.

Szybki i wściekły czy rozważny i systematyczny – który kierunek wybierzesz testerze? Joanna Jeziorska had great presentation encouraging us to work on improving our brains. great stuff. One thing it was in my opinion lacking is a strong conclusion.

Case study: Globalne wdrożenie narzędzia Jira w firmie konsultingowej – I enjoyed Jira Case Study. But it was mostly thanks to Kasia and Bart sitting next to me. Looking at how people actually developing Jira react to basically a fan singing high praises for their product was amazing.

So how was my presentation?

I was talking about Mob programming. It went great and not so great.
There were few scraw ups. First was communication wise. The sound people connected to me a mic for recording purposes and when I asked if the sound from it goes to the room they said yes. Apparently, the miss understood me and I had to use the second one for talking to the audience. So first few minutes people weren’t hearing me.
My second scraw up saved me. I am talking too fast so I am trying to slow down. And I failed at it. But this time It was for better:
I thought I will have 45 minutes so I planned to talk for 30 minutes do demo for 10 and then Q&A for 5.
Unfortunately, I had 40 minutes, not 45. Fortunately, I did my presentation to fast and so fast that I had 15 minutes for demo instead of 10 😀
So how I have demoed it? By doing mob testing – we took one of the popular pages for training automation and we did test it.
I think it did gave a good look and feel how to start mobbing. And yes I know the name out of context is awful.

I’ve got a lot of positive feedback on my talk. Of course, I haven’t convinced everybody.
The good example was Test-engineer he was completely not convinced by the idea. But honestly he wasn’t my target – that was a conference for juniors and I was addressing my materials to them. Seasoned seniors weren’t my targeted audience. So as much as it makes me little sad It is an acceptable loss.  

I will be doing demonstration of mob programming or  WrotQA around end of the year, and I think that kind of workshop will be more intresting for experienced people.

That all!

Overall it was interesting to experience and I would recommend it to young testers.
I will definitely take part in CfP next year!
And What about you? Did you visit TestCamp? What talks do you like?

If you want to read about other conferences you can check it here. In case you are intrested where I will be next – full event list here.