I attended a local software testing meetup yesterday. Typically, I’d only join if the venue was near work, but I had the day off so stressing out over getting to the venue wasn’t an issue. What also lured me in is that there would be a talk on chartered exploratory testing and mind mapping. It’s not the first time I’ve ever heard of those things, but to hear about them in a local context was something that got me interested.
Actually, hearing things in a local context is why I generally bother to attend these meetups. You can google the concepts, you can google for tools, but you can’t google how other peers are doing software testing locally.
So the meetup had 2 parts — 3 if you count the part where we got fed free pizza and soft drinks. There was the talk on Collaborative Test Design by Ian Pestelos (I’ll link to the slides if the deck gets shared), and there was an Open Space discussion. Since “Open Space” was in title-case, I went ahead and googled it and found this (from Martin Fowler’s site) and this (how to run an Open Space event). An interesting take-away from googling about Open Space is The Law of Two Feet:
If, during the course of the gathering, any person finds themselves in a situation where they are neither learning nor contributing, they must go to some more productive place.
Overall, I enjoyed Ian’s talk, and I wouldn’t have second thoughts about recommending it to peers. The Open Space discussion, not my favorite thing. Would I go to one of these meetups again? Sure, if there’d be talks on topics I find interesting and if my schedule permits.
(Just some notes after the read-more)
Mind mapping tools shared:
- XMind – http://www.xmind.net/
- FreeMind – http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
- MindMeister (not free) – https://www.mindmeister.com/
- Personally, I just use the MindMapr chrome app.
Open Space question 1: Magandang tools [Good tools] for test automation?
- Answers that came up: Selenium, MonkeyRunner (mobile, Android)
Open Space question 2: Automated vs manual?
Open Space question 3: Cross-browser testing tool?
- Answers that came up: crossbrowsertesting.com, SauceLabs
Open Space question 4: Anyone here doing ATDD/BDD?
- Answers that came up (were more of stuff tried than in actual/current projects): Robotium (mobile, Android), Cucumber (using Ruby)
testkeis 
Its great to hear about testing meetups happening around the globe. These testing meet ups will surely help testing executives to have more grip on their testing concepts & make their clients fully satisfied.
On the topic of mind maps, I just saw this post from the Ministry of Testing’s The Dojo via the Software Testing Club > https://dojo.ministryoftesting.com/lessons/mind-maps-made-easy