The magic of an Idea, Determination, and Persistence
The Test Tribe’s Idea Generator Team had envisioned and announced #TestFlix around the start of September 2020. Soon after the ideation, the entire Test Tribe team steadily started preparation in different dimensions. As far as I can recall, to begin with, it was not known in its entirety who would work on what and when.
At the same time, we had a clear Idea, Determination, and Goal to achieve.
Long story short (I loved this phrase), we had one of its kind software testing binge on 28th November 2020.
107 software testing professionals from 44 countries got on one platform to pour wisdom and life experiences from their extensive experiences, back to back, 17 hours non stop.
From a volunteer standpoint, one thing was certain, at least in my mind, that this is another good opportunity to get along and serve the community with some useful skill(s) set. We possessed some of the required skills, had to learn a few, and coordinate with few others for the rest.
Along with the core team and City (S)Heroes team, another team was formed called the TestFlix team. Some of us were lucky enough to be part of the new team as well and we grabbed this opportunity. Today, as I am writing this, I would say that we showed up and asked how we can contribute. In the response, TestFlix has become one of the events where we learned more deeply (in this specific context) about following
- The magic of dreaming BIG
- The value of starting small and persisting till the goal is achieved
- Trust and Teamwork
- Importance of Asking Right Questions
- Feedback and Peer-review Driven Progress (As I am writing this one too!)
- Eat Your Own Dog Food (Metaphorically)
- Text Documentation, Mind Mapping, Notes taking, Stage handling, Video Editing, and so on
More about this learning experience (especially mine) will be posted as a different article on TTT and if you are reading this we highly encourage you to write for this wonderful software testing community.
Nevertheless, beyond my own learning, the overall experience also was super exciting, fun-filled, and thrilling.
Be with me as I share a few glimpses!
Coming back to preparations from different volunteers and core team members. Steadily we were assigned specific tasks, with different volunteers. Initially, I was paired with Rahul Parwal, Bala Ji(I meant Balaji Ponnada but pun intended here) for two specific tasks. Since we all had time, at least I thought that I would be doing it comfortably as time passes by. Kind of Relaxed mode!
However, One fine evening, when I called it a day for office work and started browsing LinkedIn and Twitter to see what news was floating about the #TestFlix event. I saw this #TestFlix Tweet from Jugal Patil and I smiled. At the same time ‘Likes’ started appearing from other members of the team and from the testers on Twitter. The moment I saw it, I felt excited and thought of coming out of Relaxed mode and pick up the pace. So, I called up Mahesh to get some details on what is going on and what progress we made so far and I was amazed (and stressed?) due to the number of things going on and how crucial my role was in the overall deliverables.
We are sure you have been compassionate, patient, caring, curious, excited, lucky, choosy enough to attend this event. Be it as an Attendee, Invited Speaker, Sponsor, Community Partner, or as a Volunteer. If you could not attend as a participant, then definitely we missed you there, at least this time!
But worry not, we got you covered and you can find all the 107 Atomic Talks from TestFlix 2020 on our Youtube Channel. Watch them here.
Have a high-level look at the variety of the topics covered in the binge
TestFlix was of course a platform for many first-timers and we are glad we could host Speakers who could never speak before at an event but had amazing information to share with the world.
The amazing host
@Lalitbhamare (Lalit Bhamare) was our host for the day. Lait was very instrumental in conducting the #TribalQonf / TribalQonf by The Test Tribe back in June 2020. As per the exploratory execution plan, Lalit started a few minutes earlier to create a ‘Connecting and Preparatory’ environment for the attendees. Kind of a Warming up Session.
and Binge starts…
The opening talk was about “8 things I do to solve problems creatively”.
You can see this talk here http://bit.ly/8TSolveProblems. A 4:30 minutes talk that has the potential to inspire a lot of testers irrespective of their area of specialty, experience, or job titles.
By the way, we also had injected ‘4 Key Takeaways’ as each talk gets concluded. We thought this could be useful for the attendees while they take notes as well. A glimpse of the key takeaways from the talk is here.
So with the first talk, the flow of 100+ atomic talks started with the rest of the 100+ test professionals from across the world helping around 5000+ testers from different geographical locations to learn and unlearn and become better testers.
We had a number of great names, upcoming great names and it would be an injustice if we mention a few here and leave others. Respecting each of our speakers either new or most experienced is a key value proposition of The Test Tribe. You can know more about who helped testers on that day, we encourage you to see the ‘SPEAKER LINEUP’ section on https://www.thetesttribe.com/testflix/.
While Binge was going on…
The Chat panel of Hopin, our Event platform, was buzzing with all the wonderful interactions and appreciations as the Atomic Talks were rolling one after another.
While Geosley took care of sharing the quick Speaker Bio and engaging with Participants and Speakers, Balaji, Anees, Kunal, Deepan, Jugal, Dhanalaxmi, Rahul, Prerna, and others continued taking the audience questions and providing useful information.
Ajay was busy handling Social Media while I was also sharing my experience on Twitter.
Mahesh and Nishant were making sure that the TestFlix segments keep rolling perfectly as planned without any pause or hindrance.
Knowledge, Fun, Selfies, Prizes…
Ohh yes! There were tons of prizes to grabbed through the several Contests we were running.
Our core team brainstormed a lot to make the 17 hours long event more engaging by including the Treasure hunt Game (I hope you could fully utilize your observation skills here), Selfie contests, Quizzes, and some others. It was a fun-filled learning event that had diversity, learning, Q&A, Networking, Games, and much more.
We would also want to congratulate all the Winners in #TreasureHunt, #TestFlixSelfie and #TestFlix Social contest.
Continuing to think outside the box, we are supporting planet Earth now.
Have a look at what we gifted our amazing Speakers.
Wonderful, isn’t it? A tree on the name of every Speaker 🙂
Thanking Our Proud Sponsors!
TestProject | AI Appstore | Trigent | Sauce Labs | Testsigma | Mozark | Testvox
And our Community Partners!
And of course, Thank you for showering so much love on TestFlix and making it a historical one.
Few Stats to reflect your love:
TestFlix 2020 received
- 4.69 Audience Rating out of 5
- 4.64 average Speaker Rating out of 5
- ~5200 registrations from 91 Countries, representing 2400+ Companies
- Attended by 2148 Testers from across the globe
Is #TestFlix fever over? No, not really! Who knows, we would come again and come even better. 😉
Meanwhile, as I mentioned before, we have shared all the individual videos on Youtube, please access the playlist here https://bit.ly/testflixyt2020
We encourage you to subscribe to http://bit.ly/TTT-YouTube for accessing more videos from across the events we have conducted so far.
Last but not least, in case you do not know much about The Test Tribe yet, we feel it is important we talk about Origin. In my opinion, one of the most interesting books in a tester’s life could be ‘Word Power Made Easy’ by Norman Lewis. One of the core concepts of this book is understanding the ‘Etymology’. One of the meanings of this word from Oxford is ‘The origin of a word and the historical development of its meaning.
On the same lines, you may find our ‘Origin’ story an interesting one to read at https://www.thetesttribe.com/the-test-tribe-story/ and our development in the last two years at https://www.thetesttribe.com/about-us/
To summarize,
#TestFlix: A Feedback-driven whole Team effort with the magic ingredients
Continuous Communication, Development, Testing, Delivery, Integration, and TRUST.
The core team and volunteers, consisting of Visionaries, Strategic Planners, Doers, Editors, Reviewers, Feedback providers equipped with multidimensional skill sets, made this event succeed as a seamless user experience. Weeks of hard work, coordination, ownership, and excitement. We encourage you to read more at http://bit.ly/ABonTestFlix.
Ajay beautifully summarized the Whole Team Effort in the post and more to come up.
Just to let you know that post #TestFlix, some of us had conversations around our targets and how a well-coordinated, well trusted, well-motivated team did all the work. Each and every deliverable was reviewed very well and feedback incorporated back to the work items, even on the day of the event.
It was like magic and the magic that required tons of effort! #TestFlix
About the Author:
Sandeep Garg
A professional software tester and Education investor (self and other tester’s) with diverse working experience (Bidding, Development, Management, Testing) in the software industry for more than a decade. Learned from the excellent people and organizations in software testing domain be it Testing Philosophy, Modelling, Good Practices, Technical Testing, Problem Solving, Automation, Business, and Communication. Though certified by boards like ISTQB and QAI, the Context-Driven paradigm greatly influences how Sandeep sees himself to learn and perform software testing.
