If you check our meetup on November 9 we had set up our “usual” second Thursday of the month meetup just that it wasn’t usual at all… We celebrated 5 years of monthly meetups at Tabara de testare Bucuresti!!!

On the agenda for that evening we had the overview of the presentations/workshops we had during 2017 but this time we also prepared an overview of the previous years and afterwards we continued with the workshop on “Storytelling and communication” by Stefan Bratosin.

I’m going to start with Stefan’s workshop first because the 5 years part needs to be saved for last like all the good things.

Stefan’s workshop was inspired by some improvisation classes that he took and while being involved more and more in the classroom he realized how the exercises that he was doing could help other testers better communicate and be better story tellers since this is a big part of what we do.

The workshop had a lot of cool and fun exercises like:

• The whole group had to count to 30 without anyone overlapping. The exercise was very interesting and we managed to count to 30 as a whole group(we were about 20) and without anyone overlapping. The “Aha” part of this exercise was when Stefan asked us to close our eyes and try this way to count to 30. We managed to listen and focus way better than the time we had our eyes opened and try to search each others all over the room and see who was the next one that will be going to say a number. We actually listened this time!
• Question rally – something similar to “Whose line is it anyway” ( here is an example of the show with Whoopi Goldberg) where there were only questions. We were given a theme and we could answer only with a question. Really fun exercise in which we could see in action: open or closing questions, probing questions or rephrasing.
• Another exercise from Stefan’s workshop showed us the difference between using “yes, and” and using “yes, but”. During the exercise we could notice that using “yes, but” was not at all constructive and at least during the exercise it was basically cutting off the conversation
• In the story telling exercise we had to create a story and tell it as best as we could from a team of 5 volunteers point of view. It was really fun and again we could notice on how important is to listen to the other ones or things could derail quickly. An example of a story – “The New Year’s Eve “. Our team had to create a story and the main character was our friend “Georgica”. The twist of the exercise was that Stefan would point to us when we had to switch and take the role of the narrator. By the second team which tried telling the story they could notice that they have to better listen to their colleagues rather than focusing on what’s next so they can continue on what the story was all about. If you didn’t do that, in our teams story, the main character didn’t even make it to the new year’s eve party 🙂

Besides all the fun that we had during the workshop, we were reminded how important is communication and storytelling to our tester’s job so a big thank you to Stefan.

Here are some pictures from the exercises that we did:

5 years of Tabara de Testare Bucuresti

5 years means a lot of time but as they say “time flies when you’re having fun”.

So what we wanted to do different this time from the other anniversary editions is to try and summarise all the years, basically a trip down memory lane.

For me personally were the best slides I’ve worked on so far for the anniversary editions. It let me remember how we started, how many people helped us start, what we did these past years and of course how many we accomplished, in the end showing that we are truly a community of software testers and that without the people in it, we wouldn’t have anything.

Was really challenging to summarise all of the above (and many more) so we tried our best to do it through an infographic:

As you could see in the infographic there were 71 meetups in 60 months and we wanted to showcase the meetups in each year and for this we created gifs with pictures from them and verbally mention some of them since there were a lot to go through.

2012:

2013:

2014:

2015:

2016:

2017:

We couldn’t celebrate 5 years of Tabara de Testare Bucuresti without our traditional “Cartoon Tester” special cake . Here is also a big thank you for our supporters of this edition: ING Romania and QTeam Software Solutions which helped us with the cake and snacks/beverages.

What’s next?

That’s a really good question!!! I remember 5 years ago when we started having the meetups I was thinking: ”let’s start it and see where it goes”. Oh well, it went very good, so for the next 5 years I expect even more amazing things, even more cooler meetups, more international speakers, more people being content owners, more workshops during the years and the list could continue.

Not sure what’s next or could say specific how is going to be in the next 5 years, but I certainly know it’s going to be awesome since YOU ARE “TABARA DE TESTARE”!!! and knowing the amazing people that are members of this community there is no other way than an even greater journey in the years to come.

See you at the 10 years anniversary edition,

Andrei Pirvulescu