Lets Test South Africa – Day 2 – A Test Lab in the Bar

The 5 star accommodation in the Kloofzich hotel gave me a good night's rest and a fantastic continental breakfast. I was ready for whatever the day offered. I though about partaking in the early morning hike to the waterfall but decided against it.

Scott Barber was scheduled to do the opening keynote. The United States would not allow him to leave that country since there was insufficient empty space in his passport. Dawn Haynes came to the rescue. She had prepared until the early hours of Saturday morning for the opening keynote. Well done Dawn. The talk was titled "The ongoing evolution of testing – a survival guide for career testers". The most memorable quotes for me was that we as testers should never fly solo and that we are the developer's wingman. Dawn touched on many things, including the agile test automation pyramid and the agile testing quadrants.

The day's sessions included the following workshops:

• “A Tester & Developer Story in Practice” – Facilitated by Oz Chiwayi and Janco Wolmarans
• Swimming with Sharks – Facilitated by Anna Royzman and Martin Hynie

Some of the higlights from the day's sessions were:

I was intrigued by the SCARF model, the intention of which is to improve collabaration between team members. SCARF is an acronym, where each letter is taken from the first letter of the words:

• Status, which is about relative importance to others.
• Certainty, which concerns being able to predict the future.
• Autonomy, which provides people a sense of control over events.
• Relatedness, which is a sense of safety with others.
• Fairness, which is a perception of fair exchanges between people.

When used properly, the SCARF model will assist team members with make decisions, solve problems and to collaborate effectively.

In another session we were required to build a scaled model of an airport building with some of the requirements being vague and ambiguous. A few of the requirements were later clarified, so we had to change our airport layout because we had made wrong assumptions. Next the requirements were changed, then we had to franticaly re-arrange our model again.

Dinner again finished very late. I went to have a shower with the intention of joining the evening test lab afterwards. Both conference rooms were in darkness, so I guessed that the evening test labs were cancelled. There were many people in the bar and it was very noisy. I decided not to join them there since one drink for me is too much for me and ten is not enough. I learnt from a later tweet that the test lab had moved to the bar!