Hi all,
I am Bart Knaack, testing professional for over 20 years by now and frequent speaker at several (international) conferences, but the Agile Testing Days have always had a special place in my heart.
Why? Because it is fun! There is no other conference that oozes so much fun as the Agile Testing Days, both in Potsdam, as in the USA.
The parties they throw are ‘iconic’ to say the least and the entire atmosphere is amazing.The crew is awesome and the possibilities you get to learn, but also to organize and teach are endless. I have done all kinds of cool stuff, like: Agile Game Nights, Triple Keynotes, Speaker Prep Days, but my all-time favourite must be the ‘Build Anything Lab’.
In 2015 James Lyndsay, my favourite partner in crime, (no disrespect to all the other cool guys and girls I have had the chance to collaborate with ) decided we wanted to do a ‘Build Anything Lab’. Just get a lot of rubble and stuff in a room and start building and testing stuff. The ATD Crew b(r)ought us all kinds of stuff: broomsticks, vacuum hoses, lego, desk chairs, ventilators, tools, glue, just about anything they could get their hands on.
We decided we wanted to have a Rube Goldberg machine which is nice since you can build all kind of separate modules and then test them in isolation and later on in combination. We had modules that used kinetic energy, trip wires, but also included a IOT device in our chain reaction.
Three days of building and testing, tweaking and manipulating, resulted in a interesting machine that ‘worked’ as designed (well almost, anyway). The big fun of it was to see how engaged people got with it. Some people must have spend more time in the Build Anything Lab than they did at the rest of the conference!
If you want to see the result, click here: https://youtu.be/GW6PVHRDP7g
It only goes to show the amount of freedom we got to do what we wanted to do. And the nice balance of fun and work that is being pursued by trendig technology services GmbH in setting up the Agile Testing Days. Keep up the good work and I really hope to visit a lot more ATD’s in the future!
Bart Knaack
About Bart Knaack
Bart Knaack has worked as a testmanager/ testadvisor at numerous companies, he has coached testers, build up test-teams and developed all kinds of processes, both in test, testsupport and overall quality management/improvement. He has spoken at several international conferences and is also a well known speaker at universities and colleges.
He is a true believer of Agile and Gamification. As co-founder of the Agile Games Market he knows the power of games and the role they can play in teaching the Agile Principles.