The 22nd Testing Retreat

The Testing Retreat is an opportunity for a dozen or so notable Testers to spend time together from Friday until Monday and discuss Testing-related topics in depth. The agenda is drafted in advance and votes are taken to agree the most important subjects for discussion. Rather than conference-style monologues with brief question and answer sessions, every topic is hotly debated and scrutinised. Sometimes agreement is not possible, sometimes there are breakthroughs, always there is better understanding.

Last year The Testing Retreat was held at a chateau in France and I volunteered for the role of organising The 22nd Testing Retreat in the UK. There are few venues that offer complete privacy, 12+ en-suite bedrooms, plus large dining and living rooms for all-party discussions. The selection made was a lodge in Herefordshire, which entailed flights to Birmingham and Bristol for the 'Retreat-ees' from Denmark, Netherlands, and Belgium, plus a good drive or train journey for attendees within the UK.

I had some worries beforehand that the decline of Test Management would reduce the value of The Retreat. As you can read in Dark-Jan de Grood's blog, that was not to be the case. Our roles have changed, the environment is rapidly evolving, new technical and process challenges have created possibilities requiring new approaches. Security continues to confound the best laid plans, and deterministic approaches to treating risks in isolation has been undermined by the reality of unexpected outcomes. The sequential layers and milestones at the higher levels of Scaled Agile frameworks are reminiscent of the Rational Unified Process at times, but quite different when closely inspected. Bi-modal organisations can't maintain two approaches to Testing without paying a translation overhead. Not a moment was wasted at The 22nd Testing Retreat!

The following topics were discussed more thoroughly than I have ever heard before, and I expect many Retreat-ees will use this material at conference talks and in technical papers over the coming year:

• Quality embedded in SAFe
• The role of the Chief Quality Officer (CQO)
• Agile Testing Quick wins
• DevOps
• CI/CD
• Robot testing
• Exploratory testing
• Bi-modal testing.

The 23rd Testing Retreat will be held in the Netherlands during 2018 and is already fully-booked. If this article has inspired you to attend a Testing Retreat as an alternative or complement to attending conferences, I urge you to organise a retreat among your contemporaries. My top-tips are:

1} Avoid shared venues unless you want complete strangers sitting at your table when you return from the bar;

2} Create and agree a set of rules, change the rules later if the majority of Retreat-ees agree to the change;

3} The objective is to discover new and better ways of working;

4} Plan to take a break (e.g. a trip to a local tourist spot) from the intensive discussions at least once during the Retreat, but don't make it compulsory;

5} Get a good mix of people and invite the same Retreat-ees to attend the next Retreat unless there has been a problem;

6} If anyone drops out, gain consensus from the other Retreat-ees on who to invite as a replacement;

7} Avoid conference-style presentations - use the opportunity to explain and rigorously discuss each topic;

8} A long-weekend (Friday afternoon to Monday morning) works well;

9} Get volunteers for booking the venue, handling the money, agreeing the agenda, shopping for food & drink, cooking, and administering a website for internal communication. Everyone should muck-in with washing up!

10} You will be pleasantly surprised at the value obtained and knowledge gained, especially compared to training courses and conferences.