AYE Day 1
A great start to AYE today but hotel issues put somewhat of a damper on things.
I attended James Bach's Monday morning session, Rapid Testing. He started off with a demonstration of things to consider when asked to test something. He asked someone to name a product and, based on that product, spent the next few minutes listing things he would consider when testing the application, one right after another. A pretty cool demonstration.
He then followed up by explaining how he did it and contrasting his Rapid Testing approach (emphasizing intellect and skills) with what he called Factory Testing (emphasizing artifacts). Then we went through a demo of testing a Flash application without knowing anything about the app. I was testing with another attendee of the session but ended up not doing much because initially the Flash app didn't come up for me - the flash player just loaded without the app. I did get it to come up eventually but spent most of the testing time for the app being confused.
About half way through the session, Jerry Weinberg showed up and added some great points to the discussion. All in all a great session that gave me some things to think about as I approach testing.
The afternoon session was great as well, it was a session on organizational mapping put on by Jerry Weinberg and Martine Devos. The session started off with Jerry talking about the inadequacies of traditional organization charts. Then, it was our turn to create our own organization charts but in a much different way than the traditional ones. We were encouraged to start off with a question and create the chart to answer the question. We were encouraged to use graphical thinking and adding attributes (good and bad) to the chart entities. After the break, he invited a number of participants from the same company to put their charts on display and then explain them. This ended up surfacing a very interesting problem that the folks from the company were facing and resulted in a number of comments and things to think about moving forward. after that we were out of time but a conversation between the participants and Jerry continued as the crowd started dwindling. I stayed until the bitter end, more than two hours after the scheduled end time of the session. This kind of thing is one of the great things about AYE.
Getting back to my hotel room after dinner, I was distrubed to find the door between my room and the adjacent room open. Examining the deadbolt, I found it was broken. I called the front desk and they sent someone to fix it but all he did was use a screw driver to engage the bolt. I still didn't feel good about the situation and called again to the front desk and, reluctantly, they found a room for me to move to. A minorly annoying end to an otherwise great day.
11:32:12 PM 
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