Testing in Australia

My plane landed on Friday and I’m finally over the jet lag. The past month or so has been nothing but packing, packing, PACKING. I’m over it and ready do some testing.

In the brief survey of the OZ testing landscape I’ve been able make, I’m finding that Australia has a really great testing community.

Before I arrived, I’d been having some great fun conversing with testers and developers in OZ including @erik_petersen (Melbourne) ,@alisterscott (Brisbane), @jmajma (Sydney), @deancornish (Melbourne) and @sherifmansour (Sydney). They made me feel welcome before I even showed up for work.

When I wrote up my predictions for this year, one of them was that Weekend Testing would spread. It’s been my intention all year to participate in Weekend Testing as much as possible, and with my move out of the way, I’m ready to step up my commitment. Since I’m now located in Australia, I’d like to see what the testers here, including myself, can put together.

So what is weekend testing? It’s a bottom-up way of bettering yourself as a tester. A weekend testing session lasts for 2 hours. The first hour is spent testing something, sometime in pairs. The second hour is spent discussing what you learned while you were testing. Yes, it really is that simple.

Why do I love this concept so much? This is an empowering way to learn. So much time in testing is spent in justifying our choices and double-checking that what we have found really is broken. If we don’t find something, we’ve got customers to whom we must answer. The weekend testing approach removes these high stakes, in essence, unburdening the tester and placing an emphasis on just trying to break stuff. I know that I need to learn more of this. I suspect that there are other testers in Australia who feel the same way I do.

The first goal I’ve set for myself here in Sydney is to work on my own testing skills through Weekend Testing and to see what I can do about getting others here interested.

Here is the WT web-site. I encourage testers in Australia or elsewhere who are unfamiliar with WT to do some exploring and look over some of the experience reports to get an idea of what happens. This is not about hubris, it’s about having a safe space to try stuff in testing without fear of reprimand or backstabbing.

If you’re in Australia, and you would like to participate in either a European or Indian weekend testing session, Europe testing sessions occur on Saturdays from 3-5 pm…in Europe. For Sydneysiders, this means Sundays from 2:00 am to 4:00 am. Indian testing sessions are a bit more realistic. If you are in Australia these happen from approximately 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm.

I plan to be in touch with the Weekend Testers over the next few weeks to see what we can get together for Australia. Please check out the web-site and see what you think.

Btw…the US is seriously lagging behind in the adoption of WT. What up with that??