So last weekend Mojo, Ashish, Ben and myself were all in Calgary for the TW Christmas Party. On the Saturday we took a car up to Banff for the day. Banff is about 2 hours outside Calgary, right in the Rockies. Here are some pictures from the trip. Click on the picture to see the whole set…
As you can see, Mojo in particular was having fun :-)
At the last XP Toronto we had a series of ‘Lightning Talks’. Basically 5 of us gave presentations on topics associated with TDD, each of 5 minutes, and followed with 15 minutes worth of discussion.
My contribution was this talk on Acceptance Testing. It is a summary of what I think are the important trends and tools in approaching this topic.
XPToronto - Acceptance Testing Presentation (PDF)
The format is inspired by the now famous Identity 2.0 keynote given by Dick Hardt at OSCON. It was an interesting experience, and people said that they found the presentation style useful.
This style seems to lend itself well to a narrative kind of presentation, so mine became a bit of a story about the history of and approaches to Acceptance Testing, sort of a starting point for the conversation rather than a set of bullet pointed assertions. This is particularly good for a lightning talk I think in that we don’t have much time anyway. I’m also not a fan of the bullet point anyway, so it was a muuch better fit for the way I like to present.
There are some differences to a normal presentation though:
The narrative can’t be interrupted - there is no place to pause and ask questions, and no way to go off on a tangent if the audience wants to pursue a different trail.
The slides may not provide a useful reference for the participants. I am in two minds on this one - I think that pointers to more information are probably better than bullet point assertions anyway
The medium may dilute the message. This is a problem with slideware in general, and it may actually be worse with this style until people get used to it. But I don’t know if this will be the case or not - the visual nature of the points may actually reinforce them and make it easier to recall parts of the argument. For example after the presentation a few people said that they liked the ‘brick wall separating the testers from the devs’ in slide 14 and 52, and maybe that image will come to mind next time they are in a meeting between the two groups?
Over all, I like the approach. I try to avoid slideware in general, and when I have used it I tend to a few slides, maybe some photos and lots of talking over bullet points. So I guess it is a good fit for me.
So after a frustrating time coping with spam on the old MT blog, time to bite the bullet and upgrade. Of course the bullet-biting was actually done by beyond-the-call-of-duty friend Damian who hosts this site. and the bandwidth ultimately comes from Internode, who I unashamedly plug as IMHO the best ISP in Australia.
