Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Weekend Testing Americas #13 This Weekend: New Session and a Request

First, I'd like to announce that we will be holding a Weekend Testing session this coming Saturday (June 25, 2011) at 11:00 a.m. PDT (that's 2:00 p.m. EDT, 6:00 p.m GMT, and I'll let everyone else do the math beyond that :) ). The specific mission is still being formulated, but due to interesting news over the weekend from Dropbox and security challenges they have been facing, I thought it would be interesting to test around security with the proviso that we will not be doing anything deliberately destructive to the site (I believe in a form of the Hippocratic Oath when it comes to testing live sites; explore and discover, but handle carefully and with respect for the business and their services).

To help spread the word, I'd like to ask everyone to make a mention of this session in your venue of choice (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) as well as direct email and other means. Joining a session is the same as always; please send a request to add "weekendtestersamericas" to your Skype ID list (we will add you). Also, to let us know if you will for sure be there, please send a message to "WTAmericas@gmail.com" and put WTA13 in the subject line, and a message saying you will be there, along with your Skype ID. This way we don't end up SPAMMING people who are not going to be there.

Finally, I am looking for testers willing to be facilitators for sessions. As of now, I'm the only continuous facilitator for Weekend Testing Americas. This means that the sessions are based around when I can be in town to hold and run the sessions. During the summer months, those are becoming harder and harder for me to commit to with the kids out of school and their activities adding to my time commitments. My goal with Weekend testing Americas was to have a loose group of facilitators who would be able to share the load and manage sessions with or without me. While I enjoy doing them, I don't want to see sessions only be once a month by default because that's all I can commit to. We can offer more sessions if more testers are willing to step up and facilitate.

If you would be interested in being a facilitator for Weekend Testing sessions, please send a note WTAmericas@gmail.com and let me know. I could then explain the process and the things that I do to run the sessions (note: it's not really hard to do, but it does require the willingness to lead a sometimes free willed bunch of people in discussions. Contrary to popular belief, you yourself do not have to be an expert tester to facilitate sessions (although having a good background in the areas proposed for given missions is certainly important).

I'm looking to expand the offerings for Weekend Testing Americas. Would you like to help make that a reality :)?

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