21st Testing Retreat was awesome

This weekend I spent my time in France, where 12 testers gathered in the Chateau de la busquiere to share experiences, benchmark opinions and discus trends in the testing Profession.  The Testing Retreat is a peer conference that aims to discuss relevant test topics and inspire its participants. During normal conferences there is mostly little time to have the in-dept sessions of the kind that the retreat hosts. Some of this year’s agenda topics were, but I can guarantee we discussed a lot of non-agenda topics during the breaks, dinner and time-of moments:

• Quality mission, If we as testers focus on testing i.s.o reducing complexity and dependencies in the system landscape we fail our quality mission
• DevOps, Experiences with moving to DevOps
• Agile transition, Can old school testers transition to agile teams
• Ageism in IT, Brainstorm: how can we share our experience in a less traditional way
• Testing in the large, how do we test the operational success of our new feature or release
• Agile Performance testing, Is there a contradiction in Agile and performance testing
• Compliancy and testing, What challenges does compliancy (e.g. Sox) add to the testing job
• Bug reporting in Agile projects
• Offshore testing and distributed teams, How to deal with distance between team members
• Ethics as a new quality attribute
• Trends in IT, AI and IoT have an impact
•  Agile test strategies for projects (scaled) and departments
• What should be in the ‘agile MTP’ and do we need it?

It was a very nice, inspiring weekend, that I trust enables participant to improve their value as test professional and to see developments in right perspective. I am already looking forward for next year’s edition.