It's good to learn from an activity; a provocation of some sort, a process to engage with, a moment to reflect, and a chance to share. I've built dozens of conference events and tutorials – here are frameworks for exercises that I've used in those. They tend to work well with groups; I hope you find them valuable when you try them with your team.
Most of these exercises arealready on my GitHub. Here, they're perhaps a bit tidied up, with some thought on how they've worked for me. Join the community to add your comments, and to learn from others.
I run several of these as short online workshops, ideal for lunch-and-learn sessions.
You'll find links to some exercises below, organised by workshop.
This page needs plenty of work; I need all the exercises linked here individually, and I need to organise thematically rather than offer a handful of bare links under an enigmatic workshop title. Each exercise will be a post on this site, and I'll run them from time to time with members.
Exercises
My old exercise page contains links to Questions For Testers (not an exercise), Bulk Testing, Robot Sim (needs Flash), several Puzzles, and the paper and exercises (also need Flash) for Four Exercises for Teaching Exploratory Testing. It's out of date and incomplete, and that is one of the main reasons for moving to this site.
Hands-on Lab / Work and Play
Drop-in Lab at ATD, workshop at EuroSTAR 2018.
Work and Play
Hands-on Lab
Stay Sharp
Workshop delivered at EuroSTAR2016. Primarily social exercises, all relevant to testers, built to enthuse and re-engage testers with their work.
workroomprdsSpeaker Prep
Regular long drop-in workshop delivered at ATD and at other conferences.
Speaker Prep Day – page full of exercises
workroomprdsThe TestLab
Bart Knaack and I developed the basic idea of a space at conferences for testers to test within moments of meeting. We ran it, together and separately, at many events – and at EuroSTAR, ATD, Let's Test and the STAREast / STARWest conferences, it became a regular part of the program. We often had help, and those people have gone on to run TestLabs of their own. What an amazing, exploratory and collaborative thing to be part of!
We've built so many things to do, over so many years. All ephemeral, most lost, some worth retrieving. Details to be added.
testlab.site
TestLab Variant: BuildAnything Lab
A 2-3 day open workshop at ATD2015 – ATD bravely bought in powertools and junk and IoT devices and robots and more. Bart Knaack and I took over the lobby, inviting people to drop in and build anything.
Our only stipulation was that it should work with something else. And, looking back, that it should work repeatedly and reliably, that it should be safe, that building it should be safe and achievable and fun.
Inevitably, the resulting machine was pointless, extraordinary and ran just once – but the build was collaborative, asynchronous, improvised, Agile, test-focussed, illuminating and memorable.
We recently found this video...
The Rube Goldberg machine at Agile Testing Days 2015
TestLab Variant: CollabLab
A 2 -3 day Collaboration Laboratory at ATD2017. We had a bunch of things for people to do that weren't directly testing software. Exercises built for this cross-fertilised StaySharp, SpeakerPrep and more.
Repository (currently) on my local machine.
[JL Note: it's on `/Users/james/Documents/testing, coding/collablab-exercises`, and never got to GitHub]
Action page / form (why have this?)
Impro For Testers
Workshop at Nordic Testing Days, EuroSTAR and for corporate clients.
Repository (currently) local only. Recordings stored on bulk.
GitHub links
workroomprdsworkroomprdsworkroomprds