Sunday 22 September 2019

CEWT #7 is Coming!

The seventh Cambridge Exploratory Workshop on Testing, CEWT #7, will be on 24th November 2019, hosted by DisplayLink. The topic is
Dirty Testing Secrets
What dirty secrets do you know about in testing? What dirty secrets do you know about in your team’s testing? What are your own testing’s dirty secrets? Come and share them at CEWT #7!

Practitioners in every industry do things that people outside of it would be surprised about, maybe even horrified by. Different practitioners develop their own ways of working and some of those would upset even their colleagues within their company and industry. We tend to keep quiet about these things. They are our dirty secrets.

We’re interested in exploring what testing’s dirty secrets are perceived to be, what justifications there might be for keeping them secret, and whether they are actually secret rather than visible but not seen or perhaps even deliberately ignored.

We want to discuss occasions when a secret was revealed and what the causes and ramifications of that were. We are curious about attempts to be open that failed, attempts that succeeded, and challenges around openness when trying to fit testing inside a wider software engineering culture.

We want to know  what motivates us to perpetuate a secret rather than change things, and what could persuade us to move some existing practice underground, out of view. We are wondering whether secrets are kept from particular kinds of people, at particular times, for particular kinds of practice or data. We are asking whether we ever deceive ourselves in our work.

We are also wondering how we feel about all of the above, and how we deal with those feelings in ways that help us to continue in our role, or perhaps leave it behind and try something else.
As usual, the topic is deliberately open and the discussion we want is open-ended and open-minded.

Note: this is not an open call for participants. We try to support the local testing community by inviting those who've attended other Cambridge meetups recently first.