I want to help connect people to learn from one another to advance the craft of software testing within our area.  Getting the fledgling Gulf Coast Software Testing Meetup (GCST) group going is a fun way to explore this territory.  We had our 1st Lean Coffee style GCST meetup at O’Zones last week where I facilitated a modified version of the 1-hour Lean Coffee format, the mechanics of which roughly followed this template.  After introductions, each person wrote up to 3 cards (topics), explained our subjects, cast our votes with 3 dots, racked and stacked cards, and kicked off time-boxed conversations beginning with topics with the most votes.

Eight of us gathered to ask questions, share info, insights, and experiences.  I enjoyed seeing friendly new faces and everyone seemed to have great time.  What I like about this meeting framework is the breadth of topics, how each topic could stand alone as fodder for an evening’s knowledge share.  I also appreciate how everyone has an opportunity to speak, so you get a hint of everyone’s personality and you learn a little about their interests even if you do not elaborate on their topic during the meeting.

The topics:

6 dots:  JavaScript testing in Jasmine? Appropriate for all JS Apps?

3 dots:

• Mobile development frameworks in use at your company
• Levels of testing and where to concentrate effort – UI, end-to-end, data
• UI design strategies in general

2 dots:

• Testing Kata
• Selenium
• Define “Done” in the context of software development

No votes:

• Web development with linked (semantic) data
• Do you continuously integrate code? How?
• Effort involved in automating testing in legacy code
• New to testing, where to start
• The Microsoft Stack for Windows 8 UI

Our meetup went an hour and a half, which was just the right amount of time considering that we ordered and enjoyed food and drinks as soon as we had all arrived.  As we packed our to-go boxes we talked about tentative plans for upcoming meet ups.  Some of the ideas shared included a local version of our own “Test Bash” and 20 minute show-and-tells.  I think the collective will come up with a great plan, so let’s have our March meetup be a planning session for the next 6 months.  To our friends across the bay in Mobile, AL, several of us, myself included, would be up for meeting in your area.

Parting thoughts:

• Next time, I will promote the meetup through like-minded channels, such as IT Gulf Coast and Innovation Coast.
• Thanks Chris, for reminding me to start the timer (twice!).:)
• Our group could use a snazzy logo, which better represents us… something other than the stock image I selected.  Although, I love bats, those swarming creatures look a bit ominous.
• The thumbs (up, neutral, down = keep going, I don’t care, let’s leave this topic) element used at each topic time limit was interesting here in that there was some reticence about when to use up or down.  We joked aloud that maybe the thumbs-down was kind of harsh. I wondered if it was our polite Southern cultures, which lead to this sentiment, or if I did not do a good job of explaining the thumbs.   I will get more feedback from my Dev friends who attended.
• Thanks to my social friends at the Association for Software Testing, who organized the 1st Lean Coffee I ever attended.  That early morning session at the funky cool coffee shop in Madison, Wisconsin, was energizing and showed me the possibility of trying it out on my own.