» Giving Back aclairefication

I care about my community, so I like to give back in different ways including organizing meetups and conferences, reviewing conference proposals, facilitating workshops, speaking, writing, podcasting, and live-tweeting events related to agile, software, testing, and development.

Where I’ve been lately:

STEM Volunteer, Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta

Dec 2021 – Present
“positioned to help girls develop important STEM competencies they need to become the next generation of female leaders – and to change the world in big and small ways!”

DevOpsATL

Meetup Member

Talk with your peers that are actively working on building tools, providing services and architecting frameworks to assist and build a DevOps community; and companies who run their organizations using Agile and DevOps concepts.

Ministry of Testing Atlanta

Meetup Founder

(formerly Software Testing Club Atlanta)

Our first Meetup in Atlanta, GA took place on October 15th. I ran a Lean Coffee session of 15 attendees and acted as community manager for several people in the virtual audience through a GoToWebinar provided by our host VersionOne as well as through social media channels, including Twitter and Google+. Read more about our successful experiment here. Social media pages for STC ATL are on Software Testing Club, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn.

RSVP for our Next Meetup!

DevOpsDays ATL 2022

Returning to the Georgia Aquarium April of 2022

Devopsdays is a worldwide series of technical conferences covering topics of software development, IT infrastructure operations, and the intersection between them. Each event is run by volunteers from the local area.

Event format: Morning consists of half hour talks and 5 minute Ignite talks. Afternoon consists of open space sessions co-developed by attendees, often working through content from the morning’s talks.

Most devopsdays events feature a combination of curated talks and self organized open space content. Topics often include automation, testing, security, and organizational culture. – DevOpsDays core

While there are other tech conferences in Atlanta, we’re one of the few that’s community-led, which means none of the organizers make any money off of devopsdays Atlanta. We’re able to keep our ticket prices at cost and give a lot of tickets away because we can’t do anything with any of the money but try to build upon the diverse and inclusive Atlanta community. – Ecology Computing

TestFlix 2021

So You Want to Shift Right Over into DevOps? atomic talk
As a career software tester, I heard rumors DevOps culture would put me out of a job, so I took a job testing for a DevOps team. Although I learned a lot working on integrating orchestration and workitem tracking software, I decided to go even further right to take on DevOps work myself as a site reliability engineer. Going into the new role could have been intimidating, but I made it exciting with my approach to learning. Shifting right over into DevOps gave me a new way to apply my testing skills. If you’re considering this career move, listen to my session and let’s catch up afterward to compare strategies!

Takeaways:

Examine your portable skills
Sort through process and role differences
Strategize your approach to new challenges
Apply your testing mindset in support of DevOps

Video

The TestFlix 2021 global virtual stage presents atomic talks from 100 testers and test enthusiasts around the world. Atomic talks by definition are meant to be small, yet powerful with crisp and clear takeaways.

Agile2021 – Continuous Agile Chartering

Co-facilitator for Steve Holyer’s Continuous Agile Chartering

Continuous Agile Chartering is a “new” Agile Practice for super-charging your enterprise’s Agile journey. Continuous Agile Chartering promotes self-organisation. It will connect stakeholders with developers, and it will help you optimise your planning. In this hand-on workshop, I will introduce you to this “new” Agile Practice. I’ll invite you to try it out.

This workshop is for facilitators, team coaches and product owners. It’s for curious enterprise leaders and development managers. I also invite the technical developers. This practice must work for you, and we must include you as we inspect and adapt.

Learning Objectives

Describe the three integrated focus areas for any Agile Chartering event (from the book Liftoff by Larsen and Nies).
Identify the scope of your planning horizons.
Explain how focus on each area of an agile charter can improve self-organisation and agility at every planning horizon (including the daily standup).
Use the charter-mat to place new, continuous focus on Purpose, Alignment, and Context in order to make a plan for your Agile discovery and delivery.
Create new continuous engagement with your sponsors in a way that leads to better outcomes for everyone.
Find and name varied and appropriate facilitation activities you can use for your planning events (both in the room and in a virtual setting)

Women in Agile 2021 – Renew

Jul 2021

Social media staff

This year has forced us to re-evaluate and put plans on hold. The pandemic and other disasters have had disparate impacts geographically and demographically. Some of us are struggling with loss. Many of us are carrying new burdens. In one way or another, we are forever changed and there’s no going back to “normal.” Our Women in Agile community is reaching out globally in 2021 to bring us all back together.

Through our first five years we’ve been inspired and found career and personal growth together, guided by conference themes — Inform, Empower, Expand, Activate!, Adapt — and now in our sixth year we take time to reflect and Renew.

Our familiar format will be presented live online, and as we have in the past, we’ll kick off a week of agile festivities by meeting on the Sunday before the start of Agile2021.

XP2021

Coaching Exploratory Testing

Coaching agile teams comes with many challenges – often centered around delivery. Agile doesn’t have room for manual testing – or at least you’re going to hear that from some agile team members! There’s a widespread misconception that manual testing is waste. As a result, tester team members often feel increased scrutiny during an agile transformation, where testing occurs at the intersection of speed and quality.

People exploring systems can be your best defense against unknown problems and your greatest way of finding unexpected opportunities. While automation is well adapted for repeating the same thing over and over again, human beings are great at doing things differently. If you’re not learning when you’re testing, you’re doing it wrong!

Doing is not enough! We need to think during our review and examination processes to improve outcomes. How do we design manual exploration to provide value in today’s fast-moving development culture?

Coaches attending this workshop experience the full exploratory testing charter lifecycle hands-on. Leave empowered to help traditional testers transition to testing subject matter experts and testing coaches!

Learning Outcomes:

Support tester team members as they transition to agile and adopt value-add practices of modern testing.
Structuring manual exploratory testing for transparency
Charter guidance during test execution
Outcomes of exploratory testing
Value delivery through debrief of testing session

Chaos Engineering, The Testing Show podcast

Many of us are familiar with the idea of negative testing, where we feed bad data or inputs to a program or application to see how it behaves. That works for a program or an app but how about an entire infrastructure? A discipline that has come to be known as Chaos Engineering is where this level of “testing” comes into play. Intriguing but what is “Chaos Engineering?”

Claire Moss joins Matt Heusser and Michael Larsen to discuss the good, bad, ugly, and just plain odd aspects of a discipline that is not readily understood but bears a resemblance to Exploratory Testing. It is also available to any organization that wants to implement it, provided they are ready and willing to go down a rabbit hole or ten.

SpringOne 2019

Time To Good DX

We often hear to focus on the customer, but what do you do when your customers are your coworkers? Developers are the largest group of individual contributors in software teams. It’s about time the developer experience (DX) got the focus it deserves! Devs are users, too! Wouldn’t it be great if your user needs were met?

Slideshare

Women in Tech podcast

For this episode of The Testing Show, Matt and Michael step back and invite Elle Gee, Jessica Ingrassellino, Rachel Kibler, Claire Moss, and Lihi Segev to share and discuss their own journeys in the world of technology and the various and varied experiences they have had and highlight areas that have been successes in varied places like Australia, Israel and the U.S., as well as areas where we as an industry can do better.

Mile High Agile 2019

Everything You Wanted To Know About DevOps But Were Afraid To Ask

As a career software tester, I’ve heard rumors DevOps culture will put me out of a job, so I took a job testing for a DevOps team. I’m new to DevOps, but aren’t we all? What matters most is our teams’ intentional decisions to grow our DevOps practices along with our development community.

Join me as I share my experiences blending disciplines, companies, levels of experience, and differing expectations as a member of efficient and effective delivery teams. I’ll describe common cultural and interpersonal problems I experienced while transforming a cross-functional agile team dogfooding a DevOps implementation.

Whether you’re into development, operations, testing, customer support, or product ownership, you’ll leave with concrete strategies for improving your DevOps working relationships to keep the technology running smoothly. People factors strongly affect your DevOps technical outcomes, so optimizing your flow includes improving your people practices.

Don’t feel afraid to ask about DevOps anymore!

Slideshare

XP 2019

It’s a MAD world! Contract Testing can help!

APIs as products and microservices as a design pattern have become our day-to-day reality.

With more moving parts comes more complexity and a greater need for understanding. Developers and Product Managers need early warning signs that deployment is a bad idea.

Enter contract testing. (No, not the “contract negotiation” mentioned in the Agile Manifesto…)

Provider teams building API products collaborate with the consumer teams who are their customers to determine information needs. This negotiation works out in various ways that result in interface agreements between the teams.

Join Claire for an interactive exploration of contract testing as a feedback technique. Enable greater focus on the individuals and interactions. Make responding to the changes of this MAD world easier!

DevOpsDays Atlanta 2019

Program committee, social media/live-tweeting

Theme: “Just Keep Swimming”

We have the pleasure of co-hosting this 3-track event with the 1st Map Camp outside of the UK & an inaugural serverlessdays Atlanta at The Georgia Aquarium.

DevNexus 2019

Time to Good DX

We often hear focus on the customer, but what do you do when you customers are your coworkers? Developers are the largest group of individual contributors in software teams. It’s about time Developer Experience (DX) got the focus it deserves! Devs are users, too! Wouldn’t it be great if your user needs were met?

Slideshare and Handout

Agile Uprising Podcast

Safe to Fail Organizations

In the last of our episodes recorded at Agile 2018, our host James Gifford is joined by guests Claire Moss, Erika Lenz, Andy Cleff, and Chris Murman where they discuss “safe to fail” organizations; what have they experienced, what works/what doesn’t, and how can organizations change to adopt this way of thinking. Enjoy!

Praxisflow video podcast

Live w/ @aclairefication PraxisFlow Live from @devopsdaysATL https://t.co/9u8RIKZjQ7
— PraxisFlow (@praxisflow) April 10, 2019

I got to sit out of frame and hear Claire Moss talk about contracts and pacts. I’ve heard of these before, but she highlighted multiple nuances that I wasn’t aware of. Definitely provided additional context for my thoughts on the boundary between Complicated and Complex. You can find the discussion on Twitter. – Tristan Slominski, Map/Serverless/DevOps DaysATL 2019 Things Learned

Let’s Talk About Tests, Baby Podcast

Coming soon!

The Testing Show podcast

Conferences and Conferring

With everyone heading off to conferences hither and yon, we dedicated a show to the topic. Anna Royzman (Test Masters Academy), Claire Moss (DevOpsDays) and Mike Lyles (Software Test Professionals) join us as guests in their capacity as conference organizers, speakers and attendees (not necessarily in that order) to riff on Conferences and Conferring with Matthew Heusser, Michael Larsen and Perze Ababa. Want to know where to go, what format to take part in or if you want to try your hand at speaking/presenting? We’ve got something for all those bases!

Agile2018

Everything You Wanted To Know About DevOps But Were Afraid To Ask

Social media/live-tweeting

Agile2018 Testing & Quality Track (program committee)

Books recommended at Agile2018

Agile Coach Camp San Diego

Getting the Job Done: Categorizing vs Tagging

Agile Testing Days USA 2018

Refactoring Test Collaboration

Lean Software Testing Explained

deliver:Agile 2018

Beyond Waste: Exploratory Testing Charters in Action

Bryan & Bill’s Three-Ring Design Circus (mob programming facilitator)

DevOpsDays Atlanta 2018

Program committee, social media/live-tweeting

Connect.Tech 2017

Blow your Mind! Mind-map automation in NodeJS

Agile2017

Everything You Wanted to Know About DevOps But Were Afraid to Ask

Agile Amped Podcast roundtable

What happens when you get a handful of Agilists together and ask them random questions on the fly? A lot of fun – and insights. Who’s the better ScrumMaster: Batman or Wonder Woman? What drink makes for the best retrospectives? What one piece of advice would you offer a Product Owner? Listen in and see how you stack up with our panel – Neville Poole, Chris Murman and Claire Moss. Hosted by Howard Sublett.

CAST 2017

A Day in the Life of an Automation Engineer (assisted Angie Jones with her automation workshop)

CASTcast podcast

Social media/live-tweeting

Atlanta Javascript Meetup

Blow Your Mind!: Automation with NodeJS

Agile Alliance Technical Conference 2017

A Hands-On Introduction to Exploratory Testing

Scrum Atlanta

Echoes of xP

Software Testing World Cup 2016

Walk Without Rhythm (team member)

STAC – Software testing atlanta conference

2016 workshop: A Hands-On Introduction to Exploratory Testing

2016 workshop: Intentional Learning – Map a Successful Strategy

2014, 2015, 2016: Program Chair, Board member, Social media/live-tweeting

Atlanta’s first “locally sourced” software testing conference

STAC was started by a group of testers that wanted to create the conference they’ve collectively always wanted to attend. We envisioned a forum for local testers to not only listen to keynotes from industry heavyweights, but that also grows our local testing community.

Attendees will get up-to-date knowledge and experience-based practices for software testing and what’s happening around the world, while networking with local, like-minded testers.

While our conference is for the Atlanta testing community, we invite any and all testers interested in attending to join us.

TestRetreat 2016

Agile2016

Intentional Learning – Map a Successful Strategy

A Hands-On Introduction to Exploratory Testing

The Testing Show podcast – Real Work vs Bureaucratic Silliness

Testing in the Pub podcast – Episode 32: Intentional Learning

CAST 2016

TestRetreat Vancouver 2016

Agency vs Doing What You’re Told

QualityJam 2016

Social media/live-tweeting

Targeting quality 2014

My first full day workshop, Value for People

Hey there, tester. You deliver a lot of value in your work life. Who defines this value? Who receives this value?
In this course, we’ll work our way out from you at the center of value delivery to the external customers who use the software you test.

We’ll explore the ways you deliver value to:
Yourself
Your testing team
Your product team
Your end user/external customer
Your testing community

How do we get there? We wrestle with our current information and assumptions together through interaction with both other classmates and the instructor. This is a whole class learning experience.

CAST 2014

On staff as the social media community manager.

The Association for Software Testing is pleased to announce its ninth annual conference, CAST 2014 “The Art and Science of Testing”, to be held in New York, NY, August 11-13.To some, software testing is an outgrowth of engineering, mathematics and physics, while to others, testing is an exploration of psychology, philosophy or sociology. At CAST 2014, conference speakers will share their stories and experiences surrounding software testing, whether bound by rules and laws of science and experimentation, or expressed through creativity, imagination, and artistry.

Test Retreat NYC 2014

Open spaces never fail to teach me more than I ever expected. I <3 this unconference crowd

Led a session on exploratory environments.

At Test Retreat, you’ll find something different. A chance to connect with old friends, make new ones, and build the test experience you really need. It’s not a conference … it is a test retreat.

Bring together the best and brightest minds in Software Testing and perhaps a few from the overall process of software (and value!) delivery.

We’ll start Saturday’s “Main Event” by organizing our thoughts ideas on new ideas — how to do testing better, how to exlain it, manage it, and maybe even measuring it. You might call this “thought leadership.” Our facilitator, Matt Barcomb, will help organize interests and ideas, then we’ll break into small groups to discuss, then present on our ideas. After a short break for lunch we’ll resume in the afternoon in open space format, gathering a list of proposals for topics. After proposals, the group will create the schedule together, based on interest.
In other words, the attendees will build the schedule they want, in real time, based on what we want to talk about now.
The day ends with a retrospective to collect our learnings.

We put the best people in the field in one room – people doing software testing, test coaching, and helping others do it, along with a few experts from related disciplines.
The format combines a workshop with just enough structure with plenty of unstructured, informal time. Or bring your own ideas for what to do Sunday!
We will share our stories, approaches, and ideas about testing
We will invent and experiment with new testing and coaching practices
It may involve discussing new, fundamental roles for testers and leaders of testers
We will discuss, document, and create new ways to influence the state of the practice, as well as projects to move things forward
How often do you get a chance to sit back and envision your next few years, surrounded by colleagues that can encourage you and offer realistic feedback?

Agile2014

Whole Team Testing

Presented at Agile2014

Sometimes there just isn’t enough testing time for all the testing we’d like to do as a team. For those testers stuck in a phased approach, testing can end up feeling like a bottleneck in the system, with testers constantly asking for more time or more help. Having experienced that team dynamic, I know that I can’t do all of this testing alone and I wouldn’t want to. Whole team testing reduces the time waiting for feedback and improves communication to deliver customer value sooner.

So let’s say you live in this utopia of collaboration. Everybody tests! The unparalleled beauty of your shared understanding astounds everyone and satisfies your clients. You get more feedback earlier and from different perspectives. Okay, now I envy you. When can I move in? Or I guess I could just build my own little utopia right here. But where do I start?

During this session, we will draw upon the collective wisdom of the attendees to compare notes on challenges and solutions that we have experienced as well as walking through a case study of whole team testing.

Whole team testing: because teams who own testing have more confidence in the customer value of their results

Refactoring Test Collaboration

Presented at Agile2014

Collective ownership for testing starts with understanding testing. Rework your team dynamics to evolve past duplication and improve performance through whole team testing. Take home practical patterns for improving your team’s collaboration on testing. Because teams who own testing have more confidence in the customer value of their results.

As the Pragmatic Programmers say, “refactoring is an activity that needs to be undertaken slowly, deliberately, and carefully,” so how do we begin?

In this session, we will experience the complex interactions of an agile team focused on demonstrating customer value by answering a series a questions:
Where do testers get their ideas?
How are you planning to accomplish this proposed testing, tester?
Why not automate all the things?
Who is going to do this manual testing and how does it work?
How do we know whether we’re testing the right things?

Build your own list of TODOs from these various practical collaboration approaches and begin deduping your team’s testing for a better first day back at the office.

CAST 2013

The theme for CAST 2013 is “Old Lessons applied and new lessons learned: advancing the practice and building a foundation for the future.” What we learn from our experiences helps shape us as human beings. What we learn from the experiences of others can give us new insight and new perspectives.The industry we work in is multifaceted and the technologies we work with are rapidly changing. Some testing truisms stand up over time. Some fall into obsolescence as others rise to take their place.

At this year’s conference speakers will share with you the lessons that they have learned in Software Testing, as well as how these lessons influence the way that we approach testing both now and in the future. These sessions will be filled with real-world experiences, stories, thoughts, observations, and demonstrations.

Sessions where I contributed:

TestRetreat 2013

A chance to connect with old friends, make new ones, and build the test experience you really need. It’s not a conference … it is a test retreat. Every attendee will sign up on the conference wiki, and list what they want to talk about — their own professional development plan, along with ideas on how we can influence the state of testing as it is practiced. Each attendee should expect to offer at least one session to host. Hosts can lead discussion, present, or facilitate … a full-day open space conference, with a short theme of “Deliberate Practice.” The longer theme is “Advancing And Influencing the Craft while growing personally and professionally.” After gathering a list of proposals, the group will conduct a rapid vote, called a dotting exercise, then create the schedule based on interest. In other words, the attendees will build the schedule they want, in real time, based on our interests. The format combines a workshop with Just Enough Structure with plenty of unstructured, informal time. The goal of this meeting is to impact the practice of testing while growing professionally. We expect to leave with a half-dozen projects. No just “project ideas”, but projects, actively underway, with the opportunity to impact the test community in a wildly positive way. Sessions where I contributed:

My Is Testing For Me? exercise in the style of Gerry Weinberg‘s Mary had a little lamb

Agile2013

Each year Agile Alliance brings together attendees, speakers, authors, luminaries, and industry analysts from around the world in a one-of-a-kind conference. The Conference is considered the premier Agile event of the year, and provides a week-long opportunity to engage in wide-open interaction, collaboration and sharing of ideas with peers and colleagues within the global Agile community. Teams, managers, executives, developers and practitioners across all disciplines and levels of experience will be well-served by this week-long event. In 2013, 1780 Agilists from 38 countries converged to learn, share, and collaborate while exploring Agile approaches, methods, technologies, tools, leadership principles, management philosophies and processes, plus the latest in policies, theories and research. Sessions where I contributed: