The experience of an ET experience

A good training or conference session should be very informative, interesting, insightful and entertaining. A session can be made more appealing through the use of practical examples. I was privileged to get comments like these on feedback forms for my “Mission Possible: an exploratory testing experience” session at STARWest in California. It was an unusual session for me, no slides, just me testing small applications inviting the audience to provide test ideas while introducing various attacks and other heuristics Near the end of the session. I invited Michael Bolton to test some unseen applications at the end of the session, and he discovered some intersting bugs. I had minimal notes, and had just practiced with the software so I would be familiar with what I was testing. I wanted to test lots of simple easy to understand examples in an hour session.

I was hoping that people interested in Exploratory Testing would learn and leverage what they saw in their own testing. I had around 160 people in the audience and got 100 feedback forms. I was happy to read that the presentation was well received, “Excellent idea. Liked the interaction”, “Quick examples provide insight even of you don’t test web apps”, “The content was excellent. My favorite session of the conference”,

One comment was one of the longest I’ve ever had, but not in agreement with the rest, “Incredibly useless presentation. Cute broken web apps. What did I learn? Nothing a 12 year old wouldn’t be able to find within 15 minutes. Friendly jovial presenter of the obvious”. I am intrigued that someone felt strongly enough to write down all those comments, then mark me 1 out of 10 for both content and presentation. Mmmmm, so being a friendly jovial presenter is a 1 out of 10? Interesting scale of values. I also presume they were a experienced tester to make those comments. one of the challenges with ET is trying to teach it. The best seems to be through practical examples, even if they are at a 12 year old's level! Overall, more then a third of the feedback forms gave 10 out of 10s so they got the value that I was hoping to provide. Again, when you give a session this is what you want as feedback and what I was lucky enough to get, “Erik’s presentation was entertaining and thought provoking. I could listen to him speak on this subject for hours (and it sounds like he has!)”.

So, now that the material had been road tested successfully, I’ll be offering it as a one day course. Email me via testingspot.net if you are interested.