Triangle Software Quality Association with Susan Marie & Jenny Bramble

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Welcome to the Test Guild Automation Podcast. We're all getting together to learn more about software testing and automation with your host, Joe Calantonio.

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Hey, it's Joe. And welcome to another episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. Today we'll be talking with Susan Marie and Jenny Bramble about their experiences with organizing a conference and some of their top sessions for this year. Triangle Software Quality Association Conference. If you dig testing communities, you don't want to miss this episode. Listen up. And speaking of testing communities, if you missed the Automation Guild that happened last week, I have great news for you. Even though the live event is over, the whole thing has been recorded. So if you haven't had time to buy a ticket yet, you could still purchase the ticket and watch the whole event on demand. So head on over to guild conferences.com or automationguild.com and purchase your after event ticket today.

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Hey, Jenny and Susan, welcome to the show.

Hi, how are you this morning?

Awesome. Awesome. So I'm really excited to talk with both of you today, especially about the upcoming conference, the Triangle Software Quality Assurance TSQA in Durham, North Carolina with workshops starting on February 26th and the full event taking place on February 27th. But before we get into it, could you just tell us a bit more about yourself? Jenny, let's start with you.

Absolutely. So my name is Jenny Bramble. On Twitter, I'm Jenny does things because I do things.

My two passions in life are testing and cats. If you follow me on Twitter, you know about the cat thing. I've always wanted to be able to give back to the testing community. So I speak at conferences, I help with meetups sometimes. And when I was approached to help with Tisca, it fit right in line with that. So I think I have like eight or nine conferences, a couple of keynotes this year, and I work at a place called Willow Tree that lets me do all this.

How about you, Susan?

My name is Susan Marie. I have come to the conference. This may be my fourth time attending and then this is my first time as part of the board. We've been doing this almost 30 years, maybe more. About Me I. I'M a QA manager here at Oracle. I've been in testing for 20 years. My big passions in life are my three beautiful children. And I also do quite a bit with yoga and cycling and I work with kids on bikes.

So the testing and what brought me to TISCA is really about helping other testers in their career, furthering the testing industry at large, helping us all get better at what we do.

Awesome. So, Susan, you've said you've been to the conference multiple times, but now you're part of the board. What made you want to join the board?

So two years ago, I had. Actually, it'll go farther back than that. I was pending a Bob Galen session and I happened to be sitting next to this person that I recognized vaguely. And we did a planning session around storytelling, sort of. It was a product owner Agile Focus thing. And it turns out that I was sitting next to Paul Merril and we planned a conference or planned a vacation for our kids. And at the time they were different ages and we really connected on that. And then I ran into Paul at so many of the different meetups subsequent to that, he called me and asked me to help out with some of the vendor coordination that was happening on site last year. And I had so much fun. Sort of the bold geekiness of what we do came forward. People just honestly wanted to help, wanted to learn. And I was so inspired by the organization of it that when this next conference came in, I wanted to be more and more involved.

Nice. And Jenny, you seem to be pretty in demand lately. What made you want to speak at this conference?

So actually I'm helping organize as well, as well as speaking and giving a workshop. One of the big things that made me want to get involved more deeply with TISCA is that it's extremely local forward. So the Triangle has an incredibly vibrant testing community. It is so beautiful, so varied and so amazing. And Tisca really says, okay, what we want to do is have an amazing, gorgeous, nationally recognized conference that focuses on our locals. So most of our speakers are local, most of our workshops are local. Angie Jones is our keynote, and she's not technically local anymore, but she's always going to be one of us. And we keep the cost so incredibly low that we want to make it affordable for all of the college students that are in the area, all the people that may be underemployed. Anyone who needs TISCA can get tisca. And that's really what drew me to it, is the fact that it is local forward, that we have this community and this is a way that I can directly support my hometown.

Nice. Is that the type of vibe you would get if someone was to attend? It's more. Is it a lot of youth from the colleges trying to learn more about the industry?

I wouldn't say it's a lot of youths. I would say it's a slightly younger crowd, because we do say, hey, come to tisca. Learn as much as you can. It's very low cost. This is an amazing first conference. They also let us lean into our theme pretty hard. So our theme this year is the space of Testing. Susan came up with that. She's brilliant. She also came up with our track titles. We really lean into this and we say, hey, you know what? Testing is fun. Testing is amazing. Let's have this huge professional event and let's make it exciting and fun. So we do attract a lot of different people from different areas, and everybody is super accessible. It's going to be a great time.

You did say it does have a local flavor. Are there other. What's the makeup of the audience usually, though? Do people from other states tend to join, or is it really mostly local folks that usually go to this event?

We have so many huge companies right here. We are a technology hub here in Raleigh, Durham. So we've got major corporations. We've got Microsoft here, we've got Cisco here. We've got IBM, we've got NetApp. We've got just a huge wealth of people here. So probably 60% of our attendees are local, coming from larger organizations. We have a huge group of people that come in from sas, from Deutsche bank, and we continue to grow sort of organically and locally. We like to keep that flair because, as I said earlier, this is really about people who are trying to grow in their career. It's people wanting to learn new practices, people who have a passion for testing that come to us. We promote from within as much as we can. So we have a number of people who are new to speaking, people who are local, coming out of TiVo, coming out of Fidelity, and these are all local companies to Durham. So it's not just that we're a local conference, but that we're already at Technology Hub. We're not Cupertino, but we are a hotspot for thought leadership, particularly in the space of QA and testing and automation. We have four different authors that are local that will be in attendance at the conference.

Who are those authors?

So we've got. Let's see. Let me see if I got the whole list handy. We've got Lisa Crispin and Ashley Hunsberger. Mike Lyles has written a book.

And.

Then there were two more. We were just talking about them and I didn't know the other two, Mary Thorne and Bob Galen, will be in attendance at it. They won't be speaking this year, but they've also written a number of the leading books on testing and agile practices. So those are four I can think of off the top of my head.

So you did mention there are a lot of companies in that area. Is this a good conference for folks to go to network, maybe find a job? Is that something that tends to happen?

Oh, absolutely. I was going to say, one of the great things about Tiska is that we do have big open spaces that you can congregate in, talk to each other, and have those social interactions that really start building your network. It's fantastic for people that are unemployed, underemployed, or are just looking to see what's out there in the testing community. And because, you know, it's the south, we're all extremely nice and polite and cracking up a conversation is so easy with everyone.

Very cool. And so it sounds like this is an independent conference. It's not like it's run by a big company behind the scenes. So does that give it a kind of. It's like an indie kind of feel as well?

100%. We are resisting having any of the larger corporations come in and really partnering with us. We want their support, but we really want to continue this to be a local conference. We think that's part of what makes it great, is getting into the local. In fact, we're trying to even go as far as making sure that lunches are all locally grown and locally sourced.

You know, just planning online conferences by myself, I find very difficult. How did the two of you plan an event like this? How did you come up with this lineup?

We've had a blast, frankly. Jenny, I want you to tell this story.

Go ahead. You know, it's been really wonderful. You're right. Organizing a conference is so much harder than I expected. But, you know, there was one night where we had a meetup and then Susan and Adrian and I sat down with a big giant TV and a glass of wine and we just went through all the speakers. We talked about the proposals that we were seeing, we made comments on them, and we really started hashing out how we could work together and how we could pull the best pieces out of our community and showcase them at tisca. It was really a lot of fun. I think we Were there until like 10 or 11 at night. The cleaners were coming through. We were just having a lot of fun with it.

We did a couple of sessions even like that. We had 132 submissions from across the world. We had people from just all walks of life, all countries. We had people who would really lean into our theme. It was super difficult. So Jenny proposed this pointing scaling system and we had to decide. We had to come up with some sort of framework that helped us identify the best of the best. It's been an invite only conference in the past. This is the first time we did a cfp. So that kind of response to a CFP gives you an idea of the reach of the organization. It was probably one of the more fun things that we've done because we really got to get into why. Why do I love talking about an accessibility talk? Why do I think Dennis Charlton's talk is going to be so amazing? And that was really the joy of it. And it was the mutual respect between we had. Let's see, Adrienne Gamble came up and Virginia, Virginia has been such an awesome organizer for us. She comes out of Zenergy, who's one of our sponsors. And the four women together, wanting to be blind, wanting to make sure that we have equal representation. We had a lot of talks around making like between us as organizers, wanting to make sure that we were fair and impartial, that we were accurately represented on the stage. Like, I wanted to make sure everyone was included and we wanted to have topics that were meaningful and inspiring.

Yeah, I think you just said something that was really important about being accurately represented. Because we did go through and we said, hey, let's look at our locals. Let's see what we've got from our community that we can really showcase. Off the top of my head, I can think of four locals who are giving their first time talks. So congratulations everyone. And not only are they giving their first time talks, but we're offering, we're saying, hey, do you want to talk at the TISCA meetup? Do you want us to watch your talk, go over your slides, anything like that? One of the gentlemen is from my company and he's actually going to give his talk in front of the company, you know, to get feedback on it. And the fact that not only can we pull in brand new speakers from this area, but they are so good and so excited to make their talks better and give back to their community. It's amazing.

Yeah. So a lot of times people think these lineups happen magically, but you really sometimes need to go and recruit people. So how did you convince some of these probably awesome people that are experts, but for some reason just felt like they didn't have what it took or maybe, I don't know, the time to talk? How did you convince them to participate?

I feel like we had the opposite problem. We had so much enthusiasm and so many good talks. I've actually been pinged a couple of times when people are like, hey, did I get accepted? Are we moving forward? And I'm like, I don't know. We have. We're really wanting to give honor to the speakers for what happened. So so far on the the calendar we have 10.

Prominent speaker names that have come up. Damian Sanadinos is coming in. He also hosts QA for the highway. He'll be coming in for that. We've got, like I said, Lisa Crispin is coming into town. He was originally, if I recall, she's originally local but not living locally. Now we've got these big names that have already been connected with Tisca. And that's maybe part of the joy of it, is that each year you come back and you get a new inspiration. Inspiration. And everyone has such a good feeling coming out of the day that they want to come back and come back. So we actually have had more people coming and approaching us to say, hey, can I come and talk at your conference? Than we've been able to keep up with communication over.

I will say that I did hound a couple of people to put talks in.

One of my other passions is helping people get started with speaking and get ideas together, figure out how to do that. So there were a few people that I had seen at meetups and said, hey, you know what, I feel like you've got something to say. And they'd be like, oh no, no, I've only been testing for 413 years, I don't know anything.

So I would say, okay.

What can you talk to me about unprompted for 10 minutes? They're like, oh my gosh, I could tell you about this, that or the other, or here's something that I just didn't work. And I'd be like, okay, great. So we just talked for ten minutes about this. If you went out and did a couple hours of research, you could take that 10 minute talk and transform it into a 30 minute talk. If you did a few more hours of research after that or had another experience, it's a 45 minute, it's a 60 minute, you've got a workshop on your hands now. By saying that to enough people, they started saying, oh, you know what, Wow, I could, I could do that. I could give this talk. I've also got a worksheet that I hand out to people that helps me prepare a talk. So I handed that out to a few people. And you know what? They put in some incredible proposals. I think we've got one coming up on Test Cafe in Cyprus. I remember I spoke to him at a meetup and I'm like, you know what, you should put a talk in. You should do this. I feel like you've got a thing to say. And apparently he does because he's going to be there. It's going to be amazing.

Awesome. So how does the conference work? Is it. How many days is it and how's it broken down? Is it speakers and then there's workshops or just talk a little bit about the logistics of the conference itself?

Sure.

It's two days. We start on February 26th with workshops. We've got four tracks of the workshop sessions. They are the kind of session where you vote with your feet. You don't need to sign up in advance, you just show up on workshop day and.

Pick your topic. So we've got the whole team approach to continuous delivery. We've got Leading the next generation of software. This has come out straight out of Mike Lyle's book Testing in the Drive Thru. We've got risk assessment sessions with yours truly, Jenny Bramble. We've got Dev drone ops with Paul Merrill, automated visual testing with Angie Jones and one of the more prominent local speakers. I'm super excited. The automation hand at Andy Knight is going to be talking bdd, just one of my personal favorite topics. So then the second day we're staying at the Durham Convention center, which is attached to the Marriott. We have a block of hotels with a discount code available if you are coming in from out of town or if maybe you just want to see, stay in downtown Durham. We've got a lot of cool here. So on the Thursday of the conference we've got six track sessions. Five of them are content based. Some of the feedback we've gotten in the past is like we want to have sponsor material, so we put them in their own track. So the sponsors who are coming in and bringing speakers will be in their own track. So we separated that out. If you want to go learn about this tool, you know what you're in for.

Same type of story where you can decide where you want to be. There's no early registration for it. It's an all Day affair. We're going to have a testing lab. Jenny, do you want to talk a little bit about the lab?

Yeah. So ast, the association for Software Testing that puts on CAST is going to be here doing a software lab. I'm kind of not kind of. I'm very excited about this. Essentially they're going to be there all day on this, the sessions day. They'll have their own room, they're going to have a few tables, they're going to have some interesting things to do. They've talked about doing a security challenge, a bug hunt challenge. It's going to be a place where you can come do some actual hands on testing, talk about some of the things that you've learned in some of the sessions and really get some experience in something maybe you haven't done. I haven't done a lot of security testing. It's just not been something that's filtered its way into my career. So I'm hoping that I can take some time and go hang out with them and really do this testing style that I haven't had a chance to do yet.

So you do have a lot of workshops going on. So are they all day ones? Are they half day workshops?

We have two full day and four half days.

I signed up for a half day workshop because I think I would be exhausted at the end of giving a full day workshop.

Well, I'm sending some of my team to it, so rest up the night before.

Okay, I'll make sure that I've got my slides together, no spelling mistakes.

Jenny, so your workshop once again is on running risk assessment. Why do you think that's important for folks to know that it'll be attending?

So I started my career in speaking, talking about risk based testing and talking about how we can use the language of risk based testing to really communicate with people. And one of the major comments that I would get after my talk, people would say, okay, that was really great. I loved it.

How do I do it? So I realized, okay, there's a need here for a kind of level two. Let me talk about actually running this risk assessment. Let me talk about what's happened whenever I've facilitated these types of meetings for people. So what I want people to pull out of this workshop is that it's not difficult to set up and run a risk assessment session. It can be difficult to take the output from that and turn it into something useful for your company. So during the session we're going to have an example program and we're going to talk about it. We're going to say, okay, here's some pieces of this program that we want to talk about as far as the risk of it. When we do that, here's how the conversation looks. We'll break into groups, we'll do a little risk assessment in the groups, then we'll come back and we'll debrief and we'll talk about, okay, what did you find? What did you find? Let's talk about how if we had all worked super together, we would have found this baby all together. So I'm hoping it's going to be a lot of fun. I run it internally at work and it was hilarious and wonderful and just a really great time. Lots of interaction, lots of communication.

I really love your emoji rating on those sessions.

No one has actually let me use that at work. I'm very disappointed. That's fine.

I actually put it in at my organization, so I liked it.

Susan, I love how much you've got my back.

It's only because you bring all the inspiration to the table.

And this is one of the reasons she and I work so well together is because we have a lot of mutual respect and we can have a difference of opinion. Absolutely. When we were going through some of the talks, Susan would look at one and she'd be like, oh, wow, this is so directly relevant to exactly what I'm doing right now. What a great looking talk. And I'm like, wow, I understood maybe three of the words in that totally happens.

And then she'd explain it to me and then I'd be like, oh, you're right. My gosh.

It'S so good.

Yeah, there really is an openness to it.

Well, you all did a great job. I'm just looking at the lineup and the sessions themselves are really diverse in the sense that it's not all about automation or. It seems really a lot of different topics in testing that I think a tester can learn about that they may not have known about before, like accessibility, managing of remote teams. Some really different things here. Is there anything like that really jumps out at you as something that you think people are going to get a lot of value from any of these sessions.

Can I talk for a second about why we did what we did as well?

Yeah, that'd be awesome.

I was talking to some of my friends in a company that doesn't do any automation and I said, hey y', all, I'm going to a conference. I'm organizing a conference. It's so cool. One of them said, wow, yeah, conferences are fine, I guess, if you do automation.

Can you talk to me about that? They went on to explain that because they do primarily manual testing, they would look at conferences and say, oh, this isn't for me. I don't do automation. I'm not one of those people. I don't do machine learning. There's nothing for me at this conference. Honestly, that kind of broke my heart a little bit because I feel like conferences are so important to revive your interest in testing, to get your juices flowing and really get passionate about it again. When we were talking about putting together the Tiska thing, I brought that up. I said, y', all, we need to make sure that there is space for testers who don't do automation, that there is space for someone who has no interest in writing code to be able to have a fulfilling, rewarding experience, someone who's a manager, who isn't hands on anymore. Can they have a fulfilling, rewarding experience at our conference? And then can a Tester who is 100% automation, just an absolute code monkey, rock star automation, can they get something valuable out of our conference? And that led to us thinking about the tracks and saying, okay, can we balance this idea of basic testing methodology, test leadership, the emerging topics in test and automation, to make a program that's incredibly well rounded and that every tester we know could go to and get an entire day's worth of value out of?

There's a lot in automation, right? Everyone wants to know, how do I get better at automation? And there's definitely a track for that in our field. Testers need to get faster at testing. What's complicated is that you still need to devise how you'll do that work. There's this fear in our session in our field that says, is automation going to take over my job or are we going to have AI that generates my test cases and I'm no longer going to become relevant? There's a big fear of that. But the reality is we're still here. We continue to drive ourselves up the food chain with regard to more intelligent testing, better approaches to testing. And let's be real, that moment, that first inception of software with reality is very rarely smooth. It is. There are some amazing people who do high quality testing before they release. But there's also the rest of the world, who we are there to serve. And that's what we wanted to reflect in our conference. It's not just that automation is a thing, it's important and we should know, but that we're all going to be Here working together, furthering our practice.

So, Ginny and Susan, can either one of you tell me a little bit more about the sponsors that are going to be at this event?

We went out and sought out a specific type of sponsor. We wanted people who were locally influencing or were a tool that could be provided and of service to our attendees. I want our attendees to come in and say I could use that realistically so that it becomes a good relationship between the people who are there presenting content and the people who are attending. We wanted to make sure we had the right fit. So we've got Browser Stack as our chief. Browser Stack is a really cool tool that enables you to do cross browser testing. And then we've got Sauce Labs. Sauce Labs is a big name in the DevOps world for helping testers test faster and in the CI CD across all the platforms. So we felt like those were two big tools. Our next two are Local Zenergy and Beaufort. Zenergy focuses a lot on the agile practices of the world and has a QA element to it. And then Beaufort is Beaufort, Fairmont is Palmer's company. So they'll be there as our gold sponsors. We've also got Perfecto and Eliason Group. We've got Appli Tools, Pyramid Consulting, AST is coming in. They're going to be sponsoring the lab. We've got hacksawise, RBCs, mooclabs might be coming in and doing something interesting. Test Guild, of course. Thank you for all that you do for us and sharing the good word of what we're doing in our our world. And then Willow Tree, Jenny's organization as well as Deutsche Bank.

Awesome. So Jenny, what's Willow Tree? I haven't heard of Willow Tree.

Willow Tree is the company that I work for. We are a digital innovation agency, essentially working for clients to help them do their jobs better and serve their clients more. We mostly create mobile applications. If you know the Regal app, that one's ours. We've got a couple others that are pretty popular out there. But the big focus for us is, and I'm sorry, this is going to sound silly, but I'm going to say it anyway. We want to delight our users. We want it to be an application that you open it and you're like, yeah, I'm having fun buying movie tickets. I'm having fun doing my job. I can be more effective. So that's what we do. We build delightful applications.

Okay, Jenny and Susan, before we go, what's the best way to find or contact you and learn more about the Triangle Software?

Quality association conference tsqa.org that's our website. So we used to be tisca t I sqa. We've recently we've been doing this 30 years or something and we recently reorganized into a nonprofit 501 and so we had a name adjustment and it actually speaks more to the relevance of the common understanding of what QA is. So Triangle Software Quality Assurance Triangle being the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill Triangle area and so tsqa.org we also have a meetup meetup.com triangletesters if you'd like. If you can't make the conference, you can also come and visit us on our monthly events where we'll be bringing in a lot of these speakers and.

Both of you are full of a bunch of knowledge. I'm sure people would love to reach out to you as well. So Susan, Jenny, best way to find or contact either one of you?

The best way to get to me is definitely on Twitter. Jenny does things, I do things. I also help run the TISCA Twitter. I've been told I'm not allowed to put cats on there, so I haven't.

And that is tisqartp. Our hashtag this year is tsqa2020. I just love saying hashtag. I'm sorry.

I am more of an introvert. I'm usually barefoot so you can find me barefoot, but mostly what you'll find there are my passions for cycling and yoga. Professionally, I am behind the Meetup Triangle testers and also on the LinkedIn TSQA membership group. So if you are interested in that, find us Triangles after quality assurance on LinkedIn and you'll connect to me.

Thank you Susan and Jenny for your testing awesomeness links to everything of value we covered in this episode. Head on over to testguild.com a291 and while you're there make sure to click on the Try for Free Today link under the exclusive Sponsor section to learn all about Sauce Labs awesome products and services. And as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, if you missed Automation Guild 2020, no worries, you can could still buy an after event ticket and get recordings to the full event and watch all the sessions on demand. To do that just head on over to automationguild.com and buy your after event ticket today. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. I'm Joe and my mission is to help you succeed with creating end to end full stack Automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.

Thanks for listening to the Test Guild Automation Podcast Head on over to testguild. Com for full show notes, amazing blog articles and online testing conferences. Make sure to subscribe to join the Guild and continue your testing journey. This has been a Joe Calantonio production.