If you don’t live under a rock, you know it was TestBash time again. For the first time in Manchester, Richard‘s home town. And north-west England was hungry for a conference like this. The event sold out way in advance and the majority of participants was from the area.
What brought me to Manchester was the fact that the amazing Danny Dainton asked me if I wanted his ticket, as he found out that by the time of the conference he will be father of a little daughter and wanted stay around his family. Danny I promise you that this will be the last time, but THANK YOU my friend! And that gesture already describes a big component of TestBash: sharing, caring, helping, and many more, I assume you know what I mean.
TestBash is also a relaxing conference. For speakers and attendees likewise. You don’t have to worry about missing something, it’s single track. And it is always a track of really cool topics and speakers. Speakers don’t have to worry about “how many people will show up” and nobody needs to run around, searching for the next room. If you meet someone in the breaks, just ask him about the last talk, you can be sure they saw the same talk.
There we come to the next thing, TestBash is about conferring and meeting people. For me it was again a mixture of meeting old friends, meeting folks I interact with via social media and finally meet in person, and meeting new people. I love that mixture. If my introvert side becomes stronger I can mingle around old friends, if my extrovert side reigns I will meet new people. Alongside the conference there are pre- and post-TestBash-meetups where people can spend more time with each other. Because time is crucial. There are more people too meet than time available, as always.
TestBash attendees are from different backgrounds, specializations, experience, age and everything. You get a lot of fresh views when talking to people there.
And there are the 99 second talks. The chance for every attendee to go on stage and talk about a topic of their choice for 99 seconds.
If I have to summarize TestBash Manchester in a few words. It was about the importance of learning, listening, being positive, yet still critical and ways to provide more value. The videos will come soon to the Ministry of Testing Dojo. It’s worth watching! You find some photos beneath the post.
The open space on Saturday presented a forum to talk about everyone’s topics and discuss it with others to get new insights, answers, questions, directions or guidance. And we had lots of good topics and a wide mixture of people to interact with. The office of LateRooms.com was a fantastic location high above the city (11th and 12th floor) and provided lots of openness and room to discuss, mingle, and confer. And Rhian from LateRooms.com was a fantastic and caring hostess. Thank you!
TestBash, it was fantastic to be part of you again this year. Rosie and Richard, great job! You are amazing.
Master of Ceremony: Vernon!
James Bach on “Managing Critical and Social Distance”
Iain Bright on the “Psychology of Asking Questions”
Kim Knup “On Positivity: Turning the frown upside down”
Stephen Mounsey on “Listening: an essential skill for software testers”
Duncan Nisbet on “Be More Salmon!”
Helena Jeret-Mäe and Joep Schuurkes on “The 4-hour Tester Experiment”
Mark Winteringham on “The Deadly Sins of Acceptance Scenarios”
Huib Schoots on “A Road to Awesomeness”
High Energy: Gwen Diagram on “Is Test Causing Your Live Problems?”
Beren Van Daele on “Getting The Message Across”
Open Space
The Agenda for Open Space
The add-on agenda
Test Pappy 
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