Session abstracts

Day 1

Jo Perold & Barry Tandy – Visualising your way to better problem solving

Ever been in that meeting where everyone goes on and on about something, and you walk out of the meeting realising that nothing has been decided and no one knows what to do? Now we need another meeting.

Problem-solving is one of the biggest parts of our jobs as creators and testers of products. Effective techniques to visualise the problems, solutions and discussions can enable us to do this better and be more productive.

Join us for a lively and interactive session, where we have a look at some of the problems faced in teams and organisations and present techniques for creating visibility for more collaborative and effective problem-solving. Together, we will use these techniques to unpack some of the real problems in the room.

Workshop

Open and introduction – (5 mins)

Why is visibility important – short lecture (15 mins)

Explore different problems in the room through conversations at each table (5 mins)

Get teams to present problems on sticky notes. Dot vote or pick the most appropriate. (5 mins)

Based on the problems selected show some techniques to create visibility and explore the problem in

a visual way. (20 mins) examples include (systems thinking, story mapping, value stream mapping,

kanban boards, gamestorming, spine model)

Divide into teams based on 4 or 5 problems (5 mins)

Get each team to visually explore the problem using one of the described techniques. (20 mins)

Debrief (What did you learn? How can you apply this to your testing role?) – share (15 min)

Learning Objectives:

By participating in the workshop, it is likely that each person takes away learning that applies to their own context and therefore we will cover many aspects that the act of collaborative visualisation can provide:

• The basic techniques of using visibility to solve problems
• The role of a testing mindset in uncovering the blind spots and assumptions in the problem
• Different visualisation techniques for different problems (
• Basic facilitation of each technique
• Collaboration and teamwork

Martin Hynie (@vds4) & Ilari Aegerter – Everything you need to know about testing workshop

The-Absolute-&-Final-Workshop-to-Everything-You-Will-Ever-Need-to-Know-and-Learn-About-Software-Testing-in-Under-3-hours-With-Money-Back-Guarantee-and-Life-Time-Technical-Support® (Batteries Not Included, Some Restrictions May Apply, It Is our Way to Say Thank You)

Wouldn’t it be beautiful if such a thing was possible? Unfortunately, reality feels more complicated. In the domain of software testing you often need to guide yourself.

As a software tester there are many things you need to know and there are very few opportunities for formal education. There is a high expectation on you to know what you need to know. How do you navigate these expectations? What exactly do you need to learn? How do you balance this professional growth with personal enlightenment? How do you transition from “learning from the best” to “contributing your unique expertise to the community”?

One of the most interesting aspects of software testing is just how many sciences and studies can contribute to our ability to be great at our job, and find both personal and professional satisfaction. Learning is so central to our craft and it can be regarded as being the foundation of where everything starts. By learning we mean the deliberate activity to acquire the necessary skills to do a great job.In this interactive half-day workshop, we will do a deep dive into learning, education and methods to acquire the skills of a world-class tester. In our exercises, we will touch into/explore skills and knowledge that you bring to the workshop, as well as:

• Cynefin and exaptation… the strong implications/opportunities for the curious minded
• “Making time for learning” (includes selling the value of personal learning to your organization)
• Multiple elements from the Satir Model (Virginia Satir)
• Heuristics vs. Principles vs. Rules and how they are tied to self-learning and formalized education
• What are the mechanisms of learning?
• How… HOW???

Please do not get a false impression. By no means is the list above complete.

Key Take-Aways

• Understand how and why learning is central to being a software tester
• Ways to develop you own education curriculum
• An excursion into a variety of skills that are essential for software testing
• Exposure to a rich set of learning techniques and how you can apply them in your professional life
• Learn how to not fall into despair when confronted with infinite possibilities
• An exploration of ideas on building local communities for professional learning and growth
• Bragging rights that you got to spend half a day of almost unbearable levels of fun with Ilari and Martin (we will make sure the other workshops hear us)

Target Audience

You are either a tester or a manager of testers and you are serious about your craft. You are a self-driven personality who understands the necessity of continuous education. You want to be even more awesome than you are now.

Mike Lyles – Visual Testing: It’s Not What You Look At, It’s What You See

How many times have you driven all the way home, only to realize you didn’t remember anything from the drive. Your mind was in a different place, and you were driving on autopilot. Or maybe you walk out to your garage and get in your car every day and are so used to the surroundings that you don’t notice that something has been taken or moved to a new location. When our eyes are so familiar with the things we see every day, our brains are tricked into believing that there is nothing that has changed.

In the popular USA TV show, “Brain Games”, we find many exercises where you, the audience, are asked to pay attention and focus on what is happening. That simple focused attention gets the majority of people in trouble, because the art of focusing on a specific area or activity prohibits the audience from seeing things that are going on around them. This “inattentional blindness” causes key details to be missed. Your brain is the most complex tool that you will ever have in your possession. However, with a highly complex tool comes the need to ensure that it is used appropriately and to its full potential.

In the testing profession, such focused concentration, leading to “inattentional blindness” can be detrimental to the success of the product being delivered. As testers, we must find a way to constantly challenge our visual images and prohibit our brain from accepting that there are no changes which could impact the quality of the product. It is critical to be aware of the entire surroundings of the testing activity and to be able to recognize and call out changes that may be easily overlooked without an attention to detail.

In this presentation, Mike Lyles will challenge the audience to literally “think outside the box”. The audience will be given specific exercises to show how that the human mind sometimes overlooks details when they seem visually insignificant or unrelated. We will examine how testers can become better prepared for such oversights and discuss strategies that can be used immediately in your organizations. The key to eliminating the risk of oversight and missed problems is learning how to identify the areas where you may have originally ignored a focused effort.

Takeaways:

• An understanding that no matter how good we believe we are as testers, we have to realize that there is the possibility of being so familiar with a product that our eyes do not notice changes that sneak in.
• Tips to recognizing patterns and potential gaps that many visual testing activities may miss.
• Techniques that can be used in becoming a better visual tester.

Jan Eumann – How Developer Tools can help you test

In this session, I would like to help you understand how Developer Tools can help you test. We will look at different browsers and the tools that are available in these browsers. You will work on several hands-on tasks to experience the features offered by Developer Tools and how these can be used as a tester.

Jan works as a Senior Software Engineer in Test at eBay in Berlin, Germany.  He has been in the software industry for more than 10 years working in different roles in the software development process. Jan started as a developer and quickly learned to appreciate skilled testers. During the last years he worked as a test engineer looking into exploratory testing and how automation can support testing.  At the moment he is working in an agile team performing testing tasks while also writing production code and educating the team and himself about testing.

@JanEumann

Session abstracts

Day 2

Keynote – Paul Holland – The Testing Profession: The good, the bad and the ugly An opinionated tirade of strong opinions and rants

Paul Holland will discuss many testing topics including metrics, automation, language/semantics, and trends in the industry. During this energetic talk Paul will talk about his own experiences, observations, and conclusions that back up his ideas. He will provide guidance as to what testers can do to combat “best practices” like “our goal is 100% automation”. He will show examples of test reports that provide actionable information and not numbers that give the illusion of information. But, most of all, he will provide you with his strong opinions in the form of entertaining rants and stories.

Jan Eumann & Janco Wolmarans – Traditional Setup vs. Pairing vs. Mobbing – An Experiment for Testers and Developers

Having worked in software for over a decade I have come into contact with many ways of coding and testing. Together with a colleague I have given session on how pairing can improve productivity – and in many situations I believe it can indeed do that. But should testers and developers pair on things or should they be separated by the proverbial fence? What about working in large groups?

Where is the data?

This is where you come in. Be part of something revolutionary while learning new techniques and ways of working.

In this workshop you will experience to work in 3 configurations: as a lone tester/developer, in pairs and in mobs. You will test, fix bugs and enhance a web application.

Together we will compare your experiences and will try to draw conclusions about which  configuration works best in which situation.

Key takeaways:

• Learn the basics of pairing
• Learn the basics of mob programming/mob testing
• Learn how to use Chrome Dev Tools to inspect the code and make code changes
• How can we find bugs earlier than in the traditional/evil testing phase?
• How can we collaborate in order to bridge the gap between developers and testers?
• Learn which way of working might be suitable for what kind of task

Requirements

Attendees should bring a laptop with the Chrome browser. It’s not necessarily needed to have developers participating. Everybody with some experience in web development or automation can act as a developer during the workshop.

Pairing:

Tester and developer work on the same machine with access to the code. Display + external keyboard/mouse for each pair would be great.

Mobbing:

A group of people will work on one machine, testing and fixing bugs. A big screen or projector + additional room would be great.

Smita Mishra – Test what sells more

For so many years, testers have focused on functionality, ensuring the applications are working properly, stable, and reliable.  However, in today’s world, with so many competing applications, products, and software packages, it is critical that testers also examine the UI/UX element of each deliverable.  If your organization is not building UI/UX testing into your test planning, then you are increasing the risk that your product may be left behind by competitors.  And if you have not experienced the art and craft of UI/UX test planning and execution, then this workshop will help you and your organization learn the proper methods to do so.

There are very few known techniques that can accurately and consistently shape a good User Interface (UI) or User Experience (UX).  While most of the companies are spending a lot of time and energy deciding the colors and bars on the screen, frankly beauty comes second. It’s also a known fact that users resist change. So how can you test for the acceptability of these changes in a way that’s beneficial to your company in terms of revenue, inbound marketing, and customer acquisition, without offending customers to the point that they make a massive exodus and go to your competitor?

The goal to success is making the customers happy and pleased with the product, while ensuring they do not feel foolish or confused. In this workshop, we will go through case studies of real world apps and stories of evolving UI and UX.  We will observe how that impacts the User Experience for better or worse.

If you are in one of these roles, this workshop is for you!

• Functional Testers
• Test Leads / Test Managers
• UX designers
• UX Testers
• Teams involved in Product development

Leo Hepis & Danie Roux – How to use Frames to get better results at work

The language we use triggers “frames” in our physical neural circuits , patterns of thinking and emotional responses that have built over time, sometimes decades.  This is true whether we are “talking” to ourselves or talking to others for example at work. Activating such frames makes them stronger, even when our intent was to diminish them.  For example, telling someone who believes that testing can be automated that “testing is not automatable”, forces them to imagine what automatable testing could be like, thus strengthening the frame.  This results in the opposite effect we desire.

How do we identify frames?  How can we use them to get agreement with others?

In this session we will explore how our misuse of frames gets us the opposite result of what we want, and how to use frames to get better results at work.

Martin Hynie (@vds4) & Vernon Richards (@TesterFromLeic) – An Introduction to Complexity and Cynefin for Software Testers

Dave Snowden’s work in complexity theory seems to have really caught the attention of many in the software testing community of late, but why? And with all this attention, why have there been so few talks or workshops on the topic? Is Cynefin a tool? A model? What do people mean when they speak about complexity theory? More importantly, why should this matter to software testers? In this experiential workshop, Vernon and Martin will introduce some of the basic concepts of Cynefin, but with a special focus on how it can be immensely interesting and useful to software testing professionals.

In this session, the group will:

• Explore the Cynefin sensemaking framework itself with real examples you bring from work
• Use exercises and discussions to help uncover how Cynefin and complexity theory complement testing methodologies
• Explore the notion of shifting tester mindsets from “thinking differently” to “gaining better access to different thoughts”

Vernon and Martin aim to get testers excited about a field of study that is:

• Over two decades old
• Being extensively used by governments and international agencies
• Proven to be highly successful for studying, describing and successfully impacting extremely complex systems

Cynefin might look simple, but there’s a lot going on under the hood and it truly needs to be experienced rather than observed. Come experiment safely, and discover for yourself what might make this topic so interesting, and be part of the paradigm shift.

Carsten Feilberg & Cindy Carless – Learn to use test techniques

Because the testing space is infinite we need some guidance as to how to sample from it in sensible way.  Test techniques are a part of that guidance.

This workshop is a deep dive into using them. Together we will select the techniques to investigate – we have a bunch to select from.

The techniques are practical tools, so you will be having hands-on for this. We will show you how to use the techniques to support your exploration of a product.

We will also take a look at when to use them, and in particular: what to be cautious about, because techniques can be misleading and leave out vital parts of the testing space.

If you like to learn, to be challenged and have fun at the same time, this workshop is definitely for you.

It’s going to be lekker! Asikwazi ukulinda ukukubona!

Dan Billing (UK) – Web Application Security – A hands on testing challenge

We know that application security is important. We have to protect our customers’ data and our employers’ data while keeping our systems up and running. But do we have the skills and knowledge to meet that challenge?

During this workshop, we will begin to explore some of the concepts, skills, and techniques of security testing by working with a vulnerable web application. Through practical activities and hands-on learning, we will discover the key security issues that affect web applications today.

Testers will learn skills to identify software vulnerabilities and understand common threats and risks that occur in web-applications. We will also examine some of the tools and utilities that can enhance and extend security testing efforts. Let’s look at the essential steps to build and execute your own security testing strategies. Let’s examine how learning and mentoring can aid in the development of strategies. You can and should build up your own skills with integrated security testing. This will ensure ongoing relevance of your role in a security context, and the success of your organisations.

Building upon personal experience of integrating security testing into an existing organisation, incorporating DevOps, continuous delivery and integration, this workshop will highlight and discuss the reflections of learning from hackers, recent breaches and the socio-economic, political and technical impact upon software development organisations.

Attendees will take away a set of advice and techniques to incorporate and enable security testing into their day to day work, answering some of the questions that may arise around scope, skills, tools, models and learning.

Technical requirements:
This is a practical workshop, so all attendees will require a laptop, and the ability to install and run the application under test, as well as some open source tools that will be useful during the session. Installation instructions and a tool list will be sent before the workshop, and pre-installation is highly recommended for a smooth workshop experience.

Prior experience in security testing web applications is not necessary; however, attendees will need to be comfortable testing web applications and using modern web-browsers (i.e. Firefox, Chrome, Safari).

Alison Gitelson – Reflection & Integration

How many times have you been to a great conference, got home thinking “I learnt so much.” And then your significant other or a colleague asks you what you learned and you can’t think of one thing without going back to your notes!

Human beings learn by comparing all new knowledge or experience or perspective to what we already know. Then depending on our thinking style we either look for the similarities or the differences. Either way we make sense of the new and in the process we move it into stored memory so we can access it in future. We need some space and time to do this.

This comfortable end of the day session will give you the space to reflect both alone and with a few colleagues on what you have learnt during the day.

(any of the day’s presenters who wish to contribute images etc to help trigger memory are welcome to contribute)

Participants will:

• Reflect on their experiences of the day.
• More deeply explore their thinking or understanding of at least one session that they attended.

Prepare themselves to use one (or more) new thought/tool/learning in their own work.

Download the program (pdf) for Let’s Test South Africa 2017!

Jo Perold & Barry Tandy – Visualising your way to better problem solving

Barry has worked for the better part of his career in the banking industry with many different and diverse people and teams across various disciplines and in various roles. His passion for working with people has grown over the years and when he was given the opportunity to work with an Agile team as a Product Owner in 2013 he found a whole new world that he wished he’d discovered years earlier.
He has a worked closely with the Scrum User Group of South Africa is part of organising the local Scrum Gathering and has spoken at the gathering and local meetups and uses the learning from
workshops such as Coaching Beyond the Team with Esther Derby and Don Gray daily as an Agile coach working with various organisations on a team and organisation level.

Joanne is passionate about helping teams and people grow and improve.
She is a graduate of PSL (Problem Solving Leadership) and has worked for more than a decade in the software industry in all areas of software development. She is a Certified Scrum Trainer, and has participated in both Kanban training and coaching on Kanban initiatives. She recently attended the Cognitive Edge training from Dave Snowdon on complexity thinking and sensemaking.
Interested in both people and process improvement, she is continuously learning and finding better ways to solve problems.
Joanne has been a Scrum Master and Agile coach since 2009. She has spoken at Let’s Test Australia and Let’s test Sweden. She has given workshops at both local and international Scrum
Gatherings

Martin Hynie & Ilari Henrik Aegerter – The-Absolute-&-Final-Workshop-to-Everything-You-Will-Ever-Need-to-Know-and-Learn-About-Software-Testing-in-Under-3-hours-With-Money-Back-Guarantee-and-Life-Time-Technical-Support® (Batteries Not Included, Some Restrictions May Apply, It Is our Way to Say Thank You)

  

Ilari Henrik Aegerter’s formal studies have brought him from General Linguistics and Sociology to Software Engineering and Software Testing. He has 10’002+ years of experience in the field, coming from the medical software domain at Phonak AG and progressing to e-commerce at eBay. He is now the Managing Director of the Swiss branch of House of Test and he believes that there is still a lot of work to be done for excellent software testing. In 2013 he co-founded the International Society for Software Testing (ISST), which advocates for bringing back common sense to testing. He is currently president of the organization. In 2015 he was elected into the board of the Association for Software Testing (AST) where he acts as Executive at Large. Ilari also likes to brew beer in his leisure time.

Ever since the struggles of early renaissance philosophers, Martin has been focused on software testing and development. Centuries later, his attention has gradually focused on emphasizing value through communication, team development, organizational learning, and the significant role that testers can play to help enable these. A self-confessed conference junkie, Martin travels the world incorporating ideas introduced by various sources of inspiration (including Cynefin, context-driven testing, the Satir Model, Pragmatic Marketing, trading zones, agile principles, and progressive movement training) to help teams iteratively learn, to embrace failures as opportunities and to simply enjoy working together.
Twitter: @vds4

Mike Lyles – Visual Testing: It’s Not What You Look At, It’s What You See

Mike is a Quality Engineering Director with over 23+ years of IT experience in multiple organizations and Fortune 50 companies. He has exposure in various IT leadership roles: development, PMO, and ultimately, software testing. He has led various teams within testing organizations: functional testing, test environments, performance testing, test automation. He has been successful in career development, team building, coaching, and mentoring IT & QA professionals. He has been a keynote speaker at multiple international conferences and events. HIs first published book on leadership will be released this year.

Jan Eumann – How Developer Tools can help you test

Jan works as a Senior Software Engineer in Test at eBay in Berlin, Germany.
He has been in the software industry for more than 10 years working in different roles in the software development process.
Jan started as a developer and quickly learned to appreciate skilled testers. During the last years he worked as a test engineer looking into exploratory testing and how automation can support testing. At the moment he is working in an agile team performing testing tasks while also writing
production code and educating the team and himself about testing.
Twitter: @JanEumann

Keynote – Paul Holland – The Testing Profession: The good, the bad and the ugly An opinionated tirade of strong opinions and rants

Paul is a Senior Director of Test Engineering at Medidata Solutions, Inc. in New York City. Paul has over 20 years experience in software testing. Prior to joining Medidata in August 2016 he was Head of Testing at a small New York based consultancy for 2 years and previously he spent 2 years as the principal consultant and owner at Testing Thoughts, and 17 years at Alcatel-Lucent.
Paul specializes in adapting testing methodologies to reduce waste, and be more effective and efficient. Finding ways to document only that which needs to be documented. Modifying reporting of test activities to provide actionable information to stakeholders and reduce/eliminate potentially harmful metrics. Paul is one of four instructors of the Rapid Software Testing course, developed by James Bach and Michael Bolton.

Jan Eumann & Janco Wolmarans – Traditional Setup vs. Pairing vs. Mobbing – An Experiment for Testers and Developers

Janco has spent two decades learning how NOT to build software. He’s on a journey of understanding the fundamental nature of software and software development. You can usually find him working as part of a team, supporting and mentoring other people on their own journey of discovery.

Find Jan‘s biography above.

Smita Mishra – Test what sells more

Smita is the CEO and Chief Test Consultant at QAzone Infosystems, which is a software testing organization. She has been a professional tester for over 16 years. She enjoys problem solving and loves to find new solutions to support her customers better.
She is also the founder of the social gifting platform Fandoro, which has a unique machine learning gift recommendation algorithm and gift checkout process.
She regularly engages with different forums to assist growth for women in her field and otherwise too.
She can be found on Twitter at @smitapmishra. She writes blogs http://wordpress.smitamishrablog.com.

Leo Hepis & Danie Roux – How to use Frames to get better results at work

Leonidas has been testing software and managing software test teams since 1994. He helps organizations understand what can be known and what cannot be known through product testing. Better informed about the capabilities of testing, organizations can improve their processes and products, to produce higher value for their paying customers. Hepis speaks about personality type at the workplace, human interaction models, and team dynamics at conferences in the U.S., Europe, and Africa. He is a co-editor of The Book on Software Testing Volume 1, a book about the software testing experience crowdsourced at Let’s Test South Africa 2016.

Danie is a people person, and change agent. He is a journeyer through problem and solution space. He is interested in being interested. Find him on his website: http://www.danieroux.com/

Martin Hynie & Vernon Richards – An Introduction to Complexity and Cynefin for Software Testers

Vernon has been testing software for 15 years starting with video games on PS2, Xbox & PC. In that time, many changes have occurred in the software development world but testers often still use the trusty old vocabulary of “tests cases”, “pass/fail” & “giving confidence”. Taking advantage of a diverse range of experiences gained on projects such as F1 racing teams, networked gambling machines and others, Vernon helps teams speak in a language the business can understand – no translation necessary!

Twitter: @TesterFromLeic

Carsten Feilberg & Cindy Carless – Test techniques lab

 

Carsten is an international speaker at testing conferences, a trained and certified scrum master, strongly advocating common-sense in programming and testing and applying the context-driven principles. He lives and works in Denmark as CEO and consultant at House of Test.

Cindy is devoted to coaching and uses her NLP learning and coaching skills vibrantly and successfully in software testing. She enjoys opportunities to apply her coaching skills to add value to other testers and project team members. She draws on her diverse career over 30 years. Starting out in accounting and financial management she has enjoyed several roles in IT, such as implementation consultant, business analyst and project manager. She is currently living in Denmark, working for House of Test practicing the craft of testing.

Dan Billing – Web Application Security – A hands on testing challenge

Daniel has been a tester for 16 years, working within a diverse range of development organisations, mostly in the south-west of England. He currently works as a Test Jumper at Medidata in London, where his role is developing test strategy, mentoring, training and the supporting the test engineering practice in the business.

Dan’s love of testing and supporting others drives him to become an active member of the testing community. He is a co facilitator with Weekend Testing Europe, co organises the South West Exploratory Workshop in Testing (SWEWT), and the South West Test meetup. He has spoken and led workshops at a number of conferences, including TestBash Brighton, Nordic Testing Days, Let’s Test and Romania Testing Conference. He also produces content for the Ministry of Testing Dojo and is also co-host with Neil Studd on the new Screen Testing podcast.

Alison Gitelson – Getting my message across bravely and effectively & Reflection & Integration workshop

Alison of CanBeeDone is a maximizer, facilitator and speaker. With past careers in Optometry, ICT and Transformation her varied experience enables her to help people find their best way of working so they, the business and our economy can thrive.

Scott Barber – Adding value as a whole not a role

Scott Barber, Chief Technologist of PerfTestPlus and former Product Owner for SmartBear load testing tools, is widely regarded as a thought-leader in the delivery of performant systems using modern Agile & DevOps principles, but is probably best known as an “energetic and entertaining” speaker and author of articles and books; Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications, Beautiful Testing, How to Reduce the Cost of Testing & Web Load Testing for Dummies). His 20+ years of experience filling a wide range of technical, managerial, and executive IT related positions have culminated in a passion for writing, speaking, coaching and activism focused on improving the alignment of development practices with executive business goals. Scott Co-Founded WOPR, served as a Director of AST and CMG, is a member of PMI, ACM, IEEE, American MENSA, ISST, the Context-Driven School of Software Testing, and is a signatory to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

Josh Lewis – States, interactions, outcomes model

Joshua is an Agile and Developer Coach who loves supporting individuals, teams and organisations in leveling up. He is currently an Agile Coach at Kaizania and an Associate at nReality. He also lectures at a post-grad level part-time at Wits.

Chris Linnell & Smita Mishra – Schools of Testing

Christopher, QA Manager at Healthbridge, has been testing software for 13 years and is passionate about the craft. He’s lead teams for 9 years and helped a number of young testers develop their skills. Quality is something he feels very strongly about. He hopes to influence the quality of any software he has the pleasure of testing while inspiring testers around him.
Twitter: @ChrisJLinnell

Paul Lloyd – Testing: The Time Machine

Paul Lloyd is a tester, trainer, speaker, avid reader and cyclist. He has a context drivenbackground and over ten years’ experience. His testing experience has been on all types of hardware and software, in many environments which include Automated Teller Machines, Point of Sale/Service devices, high-speed document Scanners, Mobile devices, Server, Web and Desktop applications. As a Certified Technical Trainer, Paul has also given training on software products in diverse fields such as, the Swedish and South African Air forces, Petroleum Plants, Training institutions and Qualifications boards. He is continuallyreading and trying to find new ways to test and manage software teams effectively. His passion lies in implementing and managing automated test processes in a timely manner.

Richard Philips – Testing the Boundaries – How being a parent makes me a better tester

I am a South African born husband, parent, tester and ultra-trail runner.
I have a passion for adventure which took me to Scotland in 2004. It was here, working at some of the world’s biggest banks, that I found and built my love for software and my career in testing. Ironically, I also found another love in Scotland… my wife.
Driving back to South Africa in 2009 in my Land Rover cemented my affinity with the outdoors and I took up trail running, which has since become ultra-trail running.
Since moving back, I have become a father of two kids who have taught me more about life, career, love and values in 5 years than I have learned in the rest of my short existence.
I love testing. I love the opportunities it affords to integrate with real life and with the way we interact with the digital world around us. Testing isn’t just a career for me… it is a way of life.

This page can be used to synchronize your traveling to the beautiful Valley Lodge & Spa with other delegates.

Add your travel details and contact info on the #travel_ltsa2017 Slack channel on lets-test.slack.com or in the comments section of this page if you want to save a buck or two by car-pooling or sharing a cab with other Let’s Test attendees from (e.g. the airport).

Note: The shortest car drive to Valley Lodge & Spa from an airport is via Lanseria airport, 40mins-1hr (not via the more Joburg-centrally located O.R. Tambo airport, which is an esitmate 1h30 – 2hr journey).

Probably the easiest (and cheapest) way to get around in Jo’burg is to use UBER. You can call them from the airport to take you straight to the venue.
There are also various shuttle services, car hire and meter taxis. More info here.

Depending on the time of day you arrive, you may want to avoid some of the traffic around the airport and catch the Gautrain into Sandton and then UBER from there.
The only caution is that Sandton traffic can also be challenging during peak times on weekdays.

If you are driving to the venue Joburg or Pretoria and would like to car pool, please feel free to add your details and departure times to the page so that anyone that might need a lift or feel like some company, can respond to you.

Don’t hesitate to drop us an e-mail if we can help you further.