The Growing Community

The recent London Tester Gathering once again resulted in the basement room of the LVPO Bar being packed out. Only 3 months ago there were a few of us watching the barman holding a candle up the TV as people tried to connect cables, now we have 3 speakers and not enough room.

Microsoft have been along to gather feedback from the testing community and this time it was the turn of Red Gate to tell us how testers worked at their place, how good a place it was to work and to offer an iPad to anyone who was interviewed for a test engineer role. A video of people in the company saying how great it was to work there was a bit too corny and overlong - even if it is true.

Stuart Taylor of Trader Media gave a great talk on how his workplace has transitioned from Waterfail to Agile.

As the next speaker, Michael Bolton, said - it was a great experience report. Michael's talk introduced the audience to the CBC radio series How to Think About Science and the book Leviathan and the Air-Pump - so yeh, not your standard testing talk ( which I was not expecting from Mr Bolton and he did not disappoint )

Afterwards it was networking time and I got to meet Anna Baik and Jodie Parker at last and left them excitedly discussing Weekend Testing.

Looking round the room I counted 12 people I'd only known online but had finally got around to putting faces to and another 5 or so people that seem to be regulars at these events that I'm getting to recognise.

And with the Software Testing Club growing by around 10 people per day the online and offline testing community is growing and no need for testers to feel isolated.