Category Archives: Volunteering

Keep your options open

27 Wednesday Feb 2019

Posted by in Automation, DevOps, Experiences, Training, Uncategorized, Unconference, Volunteering

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In DevOps, there’s a pervasive theme of automating toil, which many would say contains all of testing. I’m just gonna say it: I come from the testing community. We’re people who constantly look for things we haven’t seen yet, who collaborate across roles, who explore the unknown, and who care about doing the right thing. Does that characterization surprise you? Yes, testing is complex enough to be a viable career and not just a thing we do until we can script it for a computer to execute.

So when I reached my limit of “X is going to kill Y” (in this case, DevOps and the testing profession), I finally went for it and joined a DevOps team as an agile tester. I wanted to see for myself that DevOps was the cultural sea change that would make my job role obsolete. If giving up my vocation was the right thing to do, I wanted to be ready with a deep understanding of the value of the new practices and to embrace the mindset shift. I wanted to be ready to bring others along with me on my voyage.

Free electron
Free yourself, electron!

When I attended DevOpsDays Atlanta 2018, I didn’t know what the community would be like. Sure, I’d helped to review their proposals as part of the program committee, but who would I meet who would change me for the better? It was my first time hanging out at an event for people who might identify as “operators” instead of just “developers.” Would they welcome me, a person without any operations background?

Inclusive collaboration wasn’t just the theme of the conference: attendees and speakers shared their authentic selves and wholly embraced it.

Although my discernment of future direction is ongoing, I see as much diversity of thought in DevOps as in agile. The afternoon unconference was my favorite experience! This format is less structured, as you might expect from the name, allowing for free-flowing conversations that address the most current burning questions of the attendees. I found operators wrestle with similar collaboration conundrums. My questions and concerns found ready listeners and new proposed solutions (in addition to new questions!). This diversity of thought helped to open up my perspective on what is possible.

Collaboration with people from diverse backgrounds and viewpoints is a competitive edge. It’s also the right thing to do. We want to keep our professional and organizational options open. Distinct perspectives provide a greater ability to handle the breadth of competitive situations we face. We need new voices and different perspectives to make change possible.

I’m particularly excited about the possibilities this year in bringing 3 communities together! Whether you’re someone looking to refine your role in the context of today’s accelerating software delivery cycles or just curious about how much DevOps, serverless, and (Wardley) mapping enthusiasts have in common, this year’s event is for you!

Our call for proposals ends February 28th (that’s today, procrastinators!), so there’s still time to share the unique experiences that only you can bring, whether through a 30 minute session or a 5 minute ignite talk. If you prefer to attend and then propose topics on the fly like I do, the afternoon unconference provides that space for emergent value.

Let me assure you that constant learning isn’t easy! Change is hard – and worth it. I expect the supportive environment I’ll find at DevOpsDays Atlanta / serverless days Atlanta 2019 / Map Camp 2019 is exactly what I need to just keep swimming. We could all use some help staying afloat.

Organizing meetups

03 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by in Approaches, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Lean Coffee, Protip, Retrospective, Social media, Soft Skills, Software Testing Club Atlanta, Speaking, Training, Unconference, Volunteering

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Announcing Ministry of Test Atlanta

Last fall was the last of our Software Testing Atlanta Conference (STAC) events. An attendee at my Intentional Learning Workshop chatted with me afterward. I mentioned that I have been a local meetup organizer and have struggled with how much control to retain. My attendee urged me to give the meetup back to the community and I have been pondering that ever since.

I’ve been the primary organizer of the Software Testing Club Atlanta meetup since we began as an affiliate of the UK-based Software Testing Club in October 2013. My charter has always been to serve and develop the local testing community including connecting it with the global virtual community. Not everyone agreed about including digital attendees, but I am willing to experience the friction of a virtual meeting to help people to attend who otherwise would not have a chance. Inclusion matters to me.

I also prefer small groups and experiential events/activities that Justin talks about. I have never had a goal of increasing the size of our meetup beyond what a single facilitator could manage in a workshop.

STAC was just a bigger extension of the meetup for me. I always wanted to reach more people in the local community, so putting together a conference focused on my geographic region was a great chance to bring new local voices to the fore. I never wanted it to be a big formal event, so I’m working on an ATL software testing unconference for the fall: shortSTAC. More on that to come!

This has been an awesome ride over the last 3 years, but we’re re-branding and branching out into our very own Meetup now known as Ministry of Test Atlanta!

Please join us to keep up with our events!

 

As part of our reboot, I wanted to share some thoughts on what challenges a meetup organizer confronts every month and why monthly events are so difficult to sustain!

Meetups are tough for reasons

 

1. Location, location, location!

People interested in testing are spread out across ATL and traffic suuuuuucks. Plus, I have no budget, so someone has to be willing to host for free or sponsor the venue fee $$. I don’t want to hold the meetup only in one part of the city since that alienates interested test enthusiasts. Proximity to public transit is something I’m not sure matters, but it would make the meetup more accessible to more testers.

Over the past 3 years, we’ve had completely different crowds depending on which part of the city we chose. I preferred to rotate locations to give everyone some opportunity to attend, even though that introduced uncertainty that probably negatively affected attendance… It’s impossible to make the “right” choice for everyone who *might* attend…

Anyway, I work at VersionOne now and that means I can host, so that’s one variable taken care of!

2. Scheduling

We hold meetings on weeknights assuming that people are more likely to do work-related things on workdays – and would be more reluctant to give up their weekend fun time to work-ish things. Getting all of the stars aligned to schedule these meetups monthly *and* give enough time for people to RSVP and then work out the logistics of showing up… Timing is hard.

Since we tend to meet after work, providing food and drink encourages people to attend, but that’s not free… and I have no budget.

3. Funding

Food and drink cost $$ – someone has to be willing to sponsor the foodz, and drink

Possible sources of funding:

4. Content

Not everyone wants to present or run a workshop or host a round table or … yeah. People will show up but may not want to provide content. I have to find a willing volunteer to do it for free or someone to sponsor a fee $$.

We infrequently have presentations. Most of our events are workshops or rountables or some sort of interactive experience. My go-to is Lean Coffee since it lowers the barrier to getting groups together and provides value to attendees every time.

I’m definitely interested in scheduling joint events with other Atlanta meetups in the future.

5. Publicity

How do people find out about meetings? I do the social media management, but I have no budget so … mostly word of mouth otherwise? Maybe chat rooms?

6. Audience

I assume that most of the people who want to come to a testing meetup are testers, but not all test enthusiasts are testers. We’ve had development-types show up, so I want to keep it open and inclusive.

7. Viewpoint advocated

I refuse to insist people agree with me. I won’t call it a context-driven testing meetup or an agile testing [PDF] meetup because I want to welcome people who subscribe to other philosophies of testing. That said, I also don’t want vendor talks (and yes I work for a vendor now). This group is for engaging with ideas focusing on and around testing, not for mind-clubbing or selling or exchanging business cards. Active participation is expected and encouraged.

8. Volunteers

Organizing: While I have always had a core group of enthusiastic participants, I’ve never had a formal organizing committee. Being a one-woman-show most of the time is pretty exhausting, y’all. The meetup consumed lots of my free time. I made my professional hobby the primary thing I did for fun outside of the office for years. Um… not a sustainable model. I do not recommend it. At the same time, working with others means compromise, so consider carefully the tradeoffs and find allies who believe in your mission.

Presenting: Members of my core group have all helped out with content for the meetup – for which I am eternally grateful! I’ve also encouraged other local aspiring presenters to practice on us. Occasionally, someone I know from the wider testing community is in town and joins us to share their wit and wisdom. I resisted presenting at my own event for a long long time… until I needed content LOL

Resolved

01 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Experiments, Publications, Social media, Software Testing Club Atlanta, Speaking, Testing Circus, Training, Volunteering

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Be-It-Resolved

Recently, Testing Circus was asking about how testers are framing their new year. Many testers contributed their plans to form quite a list! Will sharing our plans with others help us to achieve what we set out to do? It seems worth a try. More to the point, will we actually execute all the plans we make? I think it will be much like exploratory testing in adjusting based on new information we learn, but at least I’m starting out with a plan.

Here are my charters:

  1. Read. Blogs, books. Or even watching videos and listening to podcasts. (I know not everyone is a visual learner.)
  2. Small groups for collaboration, especially local. This year, I’m focusing on our fledgling Software Testing Club Atlanta.
  3. Put yourself out there to get public feedback (blog, pitch to a conference, etc). I’m currently pitching to Agile2014 and trying to get back to blogging and writing articles after the holiday lull.
  4. Experiment (trying what you’ve read, discussed). This. Everyday.
  5. And, of course, connect through social media!

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Est testing parfait?

19 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by in #testchat, Agile2013, AgileConnection, Experiments, Exploratory Testing, Hackathon, ISST, Lean Coffee, Podcast, Retrospective, Skype Test Chat, Social media, Software Testing Club Atlanta, Speaking, Tea-time With Testers, Techwell, Test Retreat, Testing Circus, TWiST, Volunteering, Weekend Testing

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I heard that Gerry Weinberg has an exercise called “Mary had a little lamb,” in which you analyze each word in the sentence to elicit implicit meaning that might be important. This sounded interesting enough to try, so when the opportunity came to propose a topic at Test Retreat 2013 I went for it. My topic “Is testing for me?” didn’t end up formally scheduled but made a nice interstitial topic to discuss with those milling about in the main room.

I chopped the sentence into separate words and wrote them top-to-bottom on a large sticky note. Then, instead of giving some sort of prepared remarks, I elicited brainstorming from the gathered participants. Having received interesting feedback on my professional and personal strengths at Agile2013 that had left me questioning how best to use my evil powers for good, I wanted to hear how others were thinking about the testing field and how it fit them.

The resulting scrawled notes ended up a mindmap, the path of least resistance for me. I won’t say the discussion solved all my problems, but it did give me some direction for future exploration – exploration that might also be helpful to a newbie wondering whether to pursue a career in testing.

Is testing for me?Which brings me to some interesting recent events:

I started composing a list of things I’d recommend to people just starting out as testers to help them to evaluate whether to continue. I wanted to encourage them to jump right in but also think big, not waiting them to wait 5 years to reach out to the wider world of testing (like I did).

Here’s my current list. I blogged about various experiments I tried, so you can read for yourself to see what it’s like to select what’s a good starting point for you.

No matter how many times I think I’ve found all the meaning in my testing career, suddenly I realize there are more layers… but like a parfait, not an onion.

Donkey: Oh, you both have LAYERS. Oh. You know, not everybody like onions. What about cake? Everybody loves cake!
Shrek: I don’t care what everyone else likes! Ogres are not like cakes.
Donkey: You know what ELSE everybody likes? Parfaits! Have you ever met a person, you say, “Let’s get some parfait,” they say, “Hell no, I don’t like no parfait”? Parfaits are delicious!
Shrek: NO! You dense, irritating, miniature beast of burden! Ogres are like onions! End of story! Bye-bye! See ya later.
Donkey: Parfait’s gotta be the most delicious thing on the whole damn planet! – Shrek

Thanks for the inspiration to write, EmJayKay80 and Niyi!

STC ATL Lean Coffee #1

11 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by in Agile2013, Approaches, Experiences, Experiments, Lean Coffee, Software Testing Club Atlanta, Speaking, Volunteering

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STCATLMeetup1-DotVotingOver the last few years, I have been getting to know other software testers here in Atlanta. Frequently, beginning this new acquaintance is such a positive experience that the other tester urges finding others similar to us to meet more regularly. This is such a common outcome that I am no longer surprised when first conversations end this way.

I don’t have much experience with the particulars of sifting through a large tech community for people interested in hanging out during their personal time to chat about testing software. However, when others insist on giving you a boost, it’s harder to say no.

I have demurred all these requests until now. Eventually it seemed silly to continue to turn down the genuine offers of resources, energy, and enthusiasm. I almost felt bad about denying people the community they so clearly craved. So here we are.

I love meeting new people and engaging them in conversations. However, I realize not everyone is comfortable doing that. I’ve noticed that having a structure to interactions can reduce the social barriers for those who might otherwise hang back.

At Agile2013, I noticed that Lean Coffee was an easy way to get to know a group of strangers, so I thought it would be a good place to start for the newly formed Software Test Club Atlanta.

I have participated in several Lean Coffee events run by different facilitators. I liked the simple style and frequent feedback so much that it was the first thing I brought back with me to work after Agile2013. The format proved fruitful for an internal meeting and so it seemed like a good idea for starting this local meetup.

Another good idea for starting something new is affiliating with established allies. Since one of my benefactors was part of the Software Testing Club community, I thought co-branding made a lot of sense. I led the idea of extending their brand to the United States since doing so would bring more people together worldwide than I could on my own. I wanted our nascent local group to be connected to the larger world of testing enthusiasts from the beginning. That would support the new members’ sense that each of them is not alone, the connection that drove creating this group in the first place. This is really a community building itself. I just happen to be in the center of it.

I love helping people to connect deeply with one another, so it seems only natural to put in the effort of providing the means for others to come together. Now that I work in social media, setting up channels for others to find us and join in the discussion was my first step. I want to be discoverable so that other local testers who feel the need for connection won’t have to wait so long for me to happen along.

I really appreciate that local businesses are supporting our efforts to make time to tackle difficult questions in testing and to share what we’ve learned through our professional and personal experiences. So you will definitely hear me being vocal about thanking them. I wouldn’t choose to do this alone and I’m encouraged that others think this is a cause worth the investment. I’m confident that we’re building a strong community of thoughtful and curious folks who give each other’s ideas a chance.

At our first meeting, I facilitated the Lean Coffee format since I didn’t want anyone to feel put on the spot to take over something they hadn’t experienced. Since we had 15 other in-person attendees and 3 online folks, this was a much larger group than normal. Although I recognized that groups of this size would normally split, I thought keeping everyone together would be better for cohesiveness.

We did use a simple personal kanban board. Each person had a chance to contribute topics. Due to the size of the group, each person had 3 dots to vote on which topics had priority. We established a 5 minute interval between votes to continue. Then, I added a “mercy kill” rule that after 10 minutes we had to move on to the next topic. I wanted everyone to experience the variety of Lean Coffee and knew that our topics were so complex that they could easily take over the entire time we had to meet. Those topics we still wanted to pursue went into our future meeting backlog.

As a result, we covered all of the topics that had received a vote. When items in the To Do column had an equal number of votes, I picked one to be the next to proceed to the In Progress column. Any topics we had covered sufficiently went into our Done column.

While this execution wasn’t a strict interpretation of Lean Coffee, it was a perfect adaptation to our purposes. The conversations continued after we had officially ended and people are looking forward to getting together again next month. We had lots of leftover pizza and beer, possibly because we were too engaged in the interaction to step away to enjoy the refreshments. All in all, it was a great investment of my time and I look forward to doing this again and again.

Please join us again this coming Thursday for another rousing Lean Coffee! We will have a WebEx available for virtual attendees, so tweet us to let us know you want to join in. See you then! Or on Twitter, Software Testing Club, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc

Software Testing Club Atlanta’s 1st Lean Coffee topics

  • 7 dots:
  • 5 dots:
    • (4th) Testing in SAFe
  • 3 dots:
    • (2nd) ATDD and/or BDD
    • (2nd) Specification by Example – getting started
    • (3rd) Exploratory testing
    • (5th) Testing in Kanban – its own column? encourages handoffs?
    • (6th) Test Manager Role on Agile Team
    • (7th) How to integrate off-shore testers w/agile teams
    • (8th) Hiring GREAT people – finding testers
    • Logic Flow Analysis and test coverage
  • 2 dots:
    • (3rd) What is breakdown of time/resources for: exploratory/scripted/automated testing (rough %)
    • (9th) Test/programmer pairing – success stories? Does it work?
    • (10th) Testing Meetups near us and around
    • Creating User Acceptance Testing
  • 1 dot:
    • Let’s get speakers! Topics?
    • What do you use to test multiple browsers?
  • No votes:
    • When to Automate?
    • What avenues do people use to find out about testing methods/tools?
    • LAWST Workshop in Atlanta?
    • Developers don’t test (?!!) (What?!!)
    • Test metrics
    • Whole team testing – good idea? How to get it working?
    • Gov’t shutdown & testing

My stupid human trick

05 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by in Approaches, CAST 2013, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Soft Skills, Testing Humor, Volunteering

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https://twitter.com/aclairefication/status/1011641593374347264

When I was growing up, my family and I would watch shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos that often involved montages of people showing off their ridiculous talents – sometimes inadvertently!

One of my earliest experiences in my testing career was participating in a planning meeting. The whole product development team migrated to the corner of our open workspace where a large board-room-style table sat lonely on most days. We all pulled up chairs, but I was one of the attendees who also pulled up a laptop. I started typing up the details of what I was hearing and began asking questions, like I do. The most exciting moment of that planning meeting was the developers noticing that I was still furiously typing their responses to the previous question while moving on to another. Apparently typing one thing and saying another was my amazing stupid human trick. My keyboarding teacher would be so proud.

To this day, my fast fingers continue to amaze, as many physically present and online lurking CAST 2013 attendees can attest. So what’s the secret to my Twitter dominance? The Micro Machines Man John Moschitta, Jr. described his rapid speech delivery as just allowing the words to flow in through his eyes and out through his mouth, so my analogue is in through my eyes and ears and out through my fingers – though I’ll allow the 140 character constraint does require some synthesis along the way.

(So, yes, Claire, we’re all very impressed with your speedy typing, but is it really all that important? Is there a point behind your stupid human trick?)

I find that content generation is a valued skill, even when it’s just providing information from someone else via social media. Helping others to feel present and included is part of my hospitality charism and I want to bring that to bear in the context-driven testing community. I started out as an online lurker and eventually became a participant, but now I have the opportunity to be an amplifier. I like to think of myself as an information radiator, bringing valuable information to light. Now what will you radiate?

The following graph of Agile2018 tweets is even funnier when you realize I was also @agilealliance (not just @aclairefication) #top2 LOL

Staying on track

24 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by in Agile, Automation, Experiences, Experiments, STAREast 2012, Volunteering

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A while back, I was talking to Matt Heusser about my sticker shock when it came to conference attendance and he pointed me to his blog post on creative ways to reduce the cost:

No, you don’t have to be a speaker. That may be the most obvious, easy, usual way in, but there are plenty of ways to serve for people not interested in public speaking: you might serve on the program committee, work the registration desk, introduce speakers, organize lightning talks, or serve as a “runner” in some capacity.

I took one of his suggestions to heart and volunteered to be on staff at STAREAST this year, which gave me the opportunity to look behind the scenes this past Wednesday and Thursday. (Sure, I missed out on the awesome tutorials this time around, but I did get that one key day of floating peacefully in the pool.)

This is a considerable shift from last year’s STAREAST, when I was free to simultaneously learn about my professional needs while designing and executing my conference schedule. This became particularly apparent to me as the week progressed and I made new tester friends who turned out to be speakers, inviting me to their sessions and I just couldn’t shirk my duties. Bummer. I’ll know to look for their names in the program next time around.

This year, I put in my bids for track selections about a month ahead of time, based on the published schedule, and hoped at least one of my first choices would appear on my list. When my track chair packet arrived, I delightedly perused the list of my tracks and my speakers. On my roster were several notable testers and several newcomers. I loved knowing I would get a glimpse into the processes of both the polished professionals and the fresh first-timers.

I read over the instructions with a highlighter and multicolored pens, calling out the relevant details so that I could support these live performances without a hitch. I’m not good with form letters, and I feel that it’s fair warning to let others know that I have a more casual and enthusiastic style of interaction, so I drafted my own email for first contact. From there, all of the advance preparation went off without a hitch and I eagerly anticipated getting settled in on Wednesday morning.

Fortunately for me, my first track was Agile Testing, so the speakers were predisposed to understand iterating to better and better results. It helped that I knew the first few speakers from in-person and online interactions. Speakers aren’t the only ones who get nervous! One of my tester friends from Twitter was in the audience to help me work out the kinks of the tasks set before me and to tune my results to make things easier on all the session participants and to keep me from stressing out.

One thing I quickly realized was that my introduction of a speaker could hardly do him or her justice, especially when we had just met for the first time, so I resolved to keep it short and sweet, trusting everyone could read the program’s bio and knowing that we were all there for the benefit of the speaker’s wisdom, not my scintillating 30-second background recap.

Though troubleshooting the hardware was certainly on my mind, I was particularly concerned with making sure the session feedback was collected and returned to the conference organizers so that they could tabulate results and provide it to the speakers in a more succinct and organized way. I know from observation and discussion how much work speakers put into their presentations and how open they are to comments. Speakers care for their audience members!

The hardest part of track chairing for me was not being free to type, scribble, or live tweet all the wonderful information flying past me! Normally, I write everything down, but I had to take it in stride and trust that my familiarity with some of the material would carry me through. However, I was also supporting sessions I might not have chosen from the program since they seemed to have a focus that didn’t match my day-to-day duties or needs – so I snuck a moment here and there to note some new revelation. As it turned out, I gleaned some value from every session, despite my expectations. Sure, I don’t work on specialized medical hardware or ERP systems, but the generalizable lessons will stand in good stead as I broaden my understanding of the variations of software testing.

When it’s all said and done, when the conference attendees have all gone home, it’s the information transmitted that can make a difference in people’s work lives – and perhaps even their personal lives – that gave me a warm fuzzy feeling to go along with the sore feet.

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Initial Impact

21 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by in Experiments, Hackathon, Volunteering

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Hackers Movie

Last week, I had my first experience of my company’s Impact Day “in which team members take a day to work outside of the office to give back to our local community.” We volunteered at the the Mobile Hackathon for Good, which the WebVisions Atlanta program described as:

Join mobile app development experts, developers and designers in an all day Mobile Hackathon for social good. The day will begin with short presentations by educators and representatives from non-profit organizations, followed by informational sessions on building apps for Windows Phone and other mobile platforms.

We had two charities proposing app ideas for us, but only one of them had specific tasks with loose requirements. Unfortunately, those oracles were not able to stay with us all day due to their regularly scheduled charitable duties, so we were left with concrete examples of activities that would benefit from a mobile app but no way to discover additional information, though I did get a chance to informally chat with a couple of the representatives before the schedule for the day began. I have volunteered with local charities through Hands On Atlanta before, so I knew from experience how frustrating it can be to part of a large group of volunteers waiting on manual, hard-copy check-in to start our volunteer work. That sounded like a good problem to tackle.

The technical informational sessions filled the morning of our “all day” Mobile Hackathon, leaving us with only 4 hours to build apps for the Windows Phone Marketplace, which none of us had done before. Although I do enjoy a good discussion on design and how to execute it well, as you can see from my tweets, I think concentrating on design was a lofty goal for such a compressed timeline. I wanted to incorporate the principles James Ashley advocated, but I first wanted to have some small piece functionality built up, such as navigating between screens. Also, I got a bit lost in the Expression Blend styles and had to have Shawn sort me out.

I think we had about a dozen folks on the Mobile Hackathon implementation crew, and we ended up informally splitting into two groups. About half of us did some whiteboard sketching and discussion of what we wanted the software to do. We had competing designs that were successively refined through an hour of discussion, leaving us only 3 hours to implement. We had many desired features and modes of entering volunteer data, but none of them fit well within our very limited time box, so we ended up abandoning the goal of adding people on site at the project location. We needed to focus on a very narrow implementation goal first. And as it turned out, we didn’t have very many developers present and not all had their own laptops installed with the Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone that we were to use as a development environment with either Visual Basic or Visual C#.

I profited the most from Shawn’s practical demonstration of building an app in a short period of time, which encouraged me to open up the software. I started several prototypes to explore the various installed templates, trying to get a feel for how to begin organizing the work. Figuring out where to start coding proved to be more of a hurdle for me, not being a programmer by profession, though once upon a time I was a Visual Basic coder for my employer while a co-operative degree student at Georgia Tech.

Since I had 4 co-workers with me, it might have seemed logical to form a unified team to attack problems like we do at work, but that wasn’t the way it worked out. Attendees Errin Calhoun and Eduardo La Hoz were on my implementation team to talk over some software design and implementation ideas, but I ended up writing the code. I wasn’t completely helpless, but I definitely benefited from collaboration with speakers Shawn Wildermuth and Moses Ngone. Even with their assistance, we ended up with a simple 3 screen app that could navigate through mocked data to a check-in view that displayed data collected as the user tapped through.

Afterward, several of us attended the Day One After Party, where my co-workers and I had an informal retrospective about the Hackathon with one of the organizers. Now, you should know that I am a reform-from-within kind of person and love to focus on opportunities to improve while recognizing what didn’t go well. I am specific in my concerns about problems I perceive in order to have the best chance of making a difference. Here are some things I noticed:

  1. Creating an actual shippable product in 4 hours was not realistic, especially with the paucity of developers.
  2. Part of the “understaffing” was a snafu in the communication surrounding the Hackathon’s location, which was incorrect on the website, printed tickets, and e-mail reminders. I think more devs would have been present without that wrinkle and I wish this had been tested in advance.
  3. However, we wouldn’t necessarily have effectively used more development talent because we didn’t have very strong self-organizing teams. Maybe it would have gone better to have a little more structure, like an event coordinator to help us identify the roles that Hackathon volunteers could fill and what our current talent pool included.
  4. We spent too much time on planning what we would want the app to do without attempting to iterate, too much like Big Up Front Design and creating requirements for stories that would have been far down the road (for sprints of that length).
  5. We could definitely have used more time to develop and less time learning about the Windows Phone Marketplace, which would never have accepted the partially completed apps that we ended up producing.
  6. In order to submit our apps, we needed to test on a Windows Phone device, which was not available. The other testing option was the Marketplace Testing Tool, which I never saw.

My design manager co-worker, Will Sansbury, had these comments:

  • Claire is fearless. [I didn’t have any development reputation to protect so I had no problem admitting a need and asking for help from strangers right away. – Claire]
  • I loved pairing with Dev through the whole process.
  • Expression Blend has a huge learning curve, and I’m not sure it’d be all that helpful once you get over that initial pain.
  • The short time box and no feature constraints necessitated a laser-sharp focus on one thing.
  • I feel bad that at the end of the day the world is no better.

We found out from our informal retrospective that this was the first Hackathon that WebVisions Atlanta has organized, so I am sure that subsequent iterations will take these lessons to heart – and in that unexpected way we have given back to our community.

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