NTD part 1

This week I attended and spoke at Nordic Testing Days Testing Conference. It was a brilliant experience. I am going to type up some of my thoughts from writing an abstract all the way through to my learnings and takeaways, so it will be split into different parts.

Writing an abstract

At the beginning of the year I decided to create a talk proposal to submit to conferences. I had some ideas, however, I wasn’t sure how to present those as an abstract, so I decided to reach out for help. Three wonderful women in testing guided me to write an abstract. I am very grateful for their help. I learnt a few things about writing abstracts that helped me personally.

1. Write about what brings you energy.
2. Think about what the conference goer will learn from your talk and work backwards.
3. Keep it concise and to the point.

Create more than one abstract

I originally created a talk abstract called “ Continuous innovation — fostering a lessons learned culture”. It was about striving for the best, continuous improvement and making little step by step changes that make a big impact overall. I could probably work on this for the future, however, I decided to pivot and write an abstract about my background with an education in Neuroscience. I’ve always been drawn to understanding how we create products that work for people. How we can make them easy to use. Products that we actually enjoy using and make our lives easier. This is what I’m drawn to first when testing and is what I’m passionate about.

I must have spent many hours trying to figure the proposal out. Towards the end I remember finding a quiet space in my bedroom and I had to kindly ask my children to get out of my room, so I could concentrate. You know when you’ve put your all into it when you’ve gone into that deep thinking zone. At the end of those three hours I felt accomplished and excited. Yes this is something that I feel excited about and want to submit.

Submit the abstract to conferences

What I then did next was submit it to three calls for papers. Agile Testing Days Germany, Ministry of Testing TestBash UK and Nordic Testing Days. Then the long wait began. A few months later, specifically on the date of March the 11th I got an acceptance letter from Nordic Testing Days, I was over the moon! After the initial excitement of the acceptance letter I had a sudden panic moment that I had to actually turn this into a talk. The proposal, for me, is only an idea. I then had to figure out exactly what I was going to say. I’ll talk about this process in a bit more detail shortly.

Conference rejection

What I want to expand on is that yes I did have acceptance from Nordic Testing Days, but not from the other two conferences — Agile Testing Days and Test Bash UK. I think it’s important to share this because behind every success are failures as well. I have learnt that it is a journey of the failures and successes and not only the successes should be celebrated. From the two conferences I did not get into, I know how I could make my abstract even better for the future.

Turn the abstract into the talk

I have absolutely no idea how many hours went into turning the abstract into a talk. 40/50 hours? It was an enormous amount of work for me. Figuring out what level of detail to go into it and to try to make it engaging. What I did initially was figure out what my sections of the talk were. Sometimes when I listen to talks I get lost in what the content of the talk was and where we are during the talk, so this is what I wanted to address in my talk. I tried to make it simple with four distinct sections 1)structure of the brain 2) how the brain interprets our environment 3) memory 4) the power of emotion driven testing. This was then my skeleton that I worked with.

Creating an opening statement

Then I went onto my opening statement — what did I want to say? This took me a long time to figure out the right words and the messaging. After many rounds I figured out the problem for me is that we tunnel vision into the technology and forget about who we’re building for. I’ve seen this happen time and again. Both in teams and also, when I observe conversations in the wider testing community. I do not want to stop the conversations about tooling, automation and so on, however, to have more of a balanced discussion of what the big picture looks like.

First draft of my talk

Initially I wrote a first draft of my talk and presented it to some trusted colleagues. They gave me some feedback, however, I felt personally that the messages that I sent out were not clear enough. I decided to bring it back more to software testing and add more examples to explain what I was talking about, so people could relate to it. This rework was worthwhile as the feedback I got from a conference goer is that they found my examples in my talk useful and it made my talk more credible. It was one of their top 2 talks of the day. Wow, I was blown away!

Structuring the talk

Back to structuring my talk — light introduction, opening statement, contents page, then talking through the four sections, closing statement, references and Q&A. One thing I did is go back to the contents slide after each section to say where we were in the talk. Also, as part of the talk I added some interactive parts of the talk to draw the audience in a little. They seemed to go down well, which was good.

I’ll write up some more parts and share my experience of the conference, thoughts, learnings and takeaways.