April 21, 2017

Ministry of Testing - Atlanta and Llewellyn Falco crash a MoT-Boston Lean Coffee!

I really didn't expect many people to show up for this month's Lean Coffee at John Harvard's Brewery in Harvard Square. We've been getting around five to ten people showing up since I held the first one back in February. Six people signed up for the Meetup event, so I expected maybe it would be four people in attendance? Me plus three? This time, though, I was in for a surprise!

I've been reaching out to other Ministry of Testing chapters here in the United States. Philly. Portland, Oregon. Atlanta. Likewise, Claire Moss, co-organizer of MoT-Atlanta, while she was attending a Boston area Agile conference, has been looking to connect to other MoT groups. Her motto on her business card? "Using my evil powers for good!"

MoT-Boston meets MoT-Atlanta. It's T.J. and Claire!



Claire is a bundle of energy! She organizes Meetup events in Atlanta, she blogs on Aclairefication.com , she live Tweets events, and schedules impromptu events like bringing an entourage of people from a nearby Alliance Testing conference to crash our Meetup with her.


After meeting-and-greeting the newcomers, I was about to start the Lean Coffee. As soon as one of the attendees saw me pull out dry-erase markers and Post-It notes from my black messenger bag, he inquired, "You want me to run the Lean Coffee?" ... Sure! Why not, I thought? It would be fun participating with the other Ministry of Testing - Boston members. How familiar was he with the concept? He mentioned, "Oh, I was there when they first had the idea".

So, for the rest of the evening we had Llewellyn Falco (@LlewellynFalco), Agile Coach, author of The Mob Programming Handbook, and co-founder of Teaching Kids Programming, running our Lean Coffee for us... Sometimes life just surprises you!

Llewellyn at work!
It was a lot of fun listening to Llewellyn's snappy patter as the conversation zipped along from topic to topic!

How did it all come to be? Welcome to the magic of Twitter! Just click on the PLAY button below and navigate the slideshow!



Here are some take-aways that interested Claire:




  • Testing: Building Quality, not into the Product, but to the Process!
  • Get good at making hard-stuff easy to automate (not automating hard stuff).
  • When choosing what to test, don't expect zero defects -- Learn in Production!
  • DevOps has QA as a Customer.

My favorite thing I shared? "The primary purpose of a QA Engineer is that of an End User Advocate". 

My favorite quote from Llewellyn: "Struggle is good for learning, but frustration is death!"

Thank you so much for everyone from #AATC2017 who showed up! It was a very welcome surprise!


Happy Testing!

-T.J. Maher
Twitter | LinkedIn | GitHub

// Sr. QA Engineer, Software Engineer in Test, Software Tester since 1996.
// Contributing Writer for TechBeacon.
// "Looking to move away from manual QA? Follow Adventures in Automation on Facebook!"
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