As a sponsor for this event and a first-time attendee, I caught up with the organisers to find out more about their routes in to Testing, and the birth of the Atelier!
We all worked together at Callcredit at one time or another and became good friends, putting on the Leeds Testing Unconference in September 2015, also held at Callcredit. We decided that Leeds needed a great testing event, decided on our principles, encouraging new voices, for all involved in testing, being inclusive, community focused and organising a conference as friends, having a great time while doing it! After the Unconference, we decided a new name was needed. There are lots of similarly named conferences out there, so we sat in the Brewery Tap trying to think of a name. Ended up searching for workshops synonyms and the Atelier was born!
The original group knew each other from Callcredit and the Test People, we were all from different levels of experience as testers or not testers at all. People get busy and circumstances change, so some have moved on, but each continue to add their personality to the Atelier. Ritch with his skills as a designer, ginger hair and making the wrong joke at the wrong time. Fred with his art, focus on inclusion and slightly unnerving Norwegian sense of the bizarre and Sophie's skills as a developer and love of helping on Atelier day. Richie joined, after being introduced by Sophie and speaking at the Atelier, his skills include a constant look of surprise and knowledge of test automation, plus a new viewpoint after becoming a developer recently. Most of all we are friends, which shines through on the day. It doesn't have to be perfect but it's a day of smiles, laughs and terrible testing jokes.
We get asked a lot about new venues to fit more people in, charging for tickets and other ways to scale. We believe in other ways however, if someone wanted to spin up another Atelier in Manchester (West Leeds) or Newcastle (North Leeds) that would be cool, hopefully we show our values through our speakers, topics, venues, food choices and this could be adopted in other locations. Scaling doesn't mean more people or more money, especially from a community point of view. Scaling the Atelier might mean less different points of view too, more of us, less of other voices. In Leeds now there is the Atelier, Leeds Tester Gathering and Ministry of Test Leeds. Different events with different points of view, at different times and dates, giving everyone a chance to attend something that meets their needs.
Sure. After university, I started out at a small geographical information systems company in Harrogate, doing a bit of everything really, from designing applications, crunching data, even creating and printing maps. This all involved testing, although I didn't have the words for it then that I do now. After that I started as a consultant at The Test People in Leeds, where I really got my career started and after heading to TestBash Brighton, I decided to become a public speaker and workshop facilitator. After loads of experience over 7 years at TTP, I headed out into the world of startups, then contracting to enable me to have the flexibility needed to focus on speaking and training.
Company and community aims are not the same. They can be similar, but they are not aiming at the same thing in the end, companies have lots of agendas, mostly hiring but also satisfying shareholders. This can lead to them being very heavy on the propaganda when it comes to events, which I think people see through quite quickly and it becomes a barrier to learning and enjoyment. At the Atelier we have no financial agenda, don't want to hire anyone, we know the Leeds tech scene as we are part of it and our agenda is that we genuinely want to improve the craft of testing in our city. Our sponsors come from relationships with people, those who value financially supporting the community, without dictating terms.
It’s during the day for a start, which is rare for a tech community event in Leeds, it is twin track, so it is packed with content, some of which is hands on. The venue is important too, it makes a statement. It’s not an office, it’s for all kinds of groups in Leeds to meet, discuss, make music, have fun and be safe. We have great relationships with the tech scene in Leeds, long-time supporters and helpers of Agile Yorkshire with links to LeedsDevOps, Agile in Leeds and LeedsJS too. We are different, but also part of the wonderfully weird soup that is the Leeds tech scene.
I started my career in a bank call centre in New Zealand and someone I worked with suggested I started looking for business analyst roles. So, I applied for one internally. I didn't get that job, but they called me back about 2 weeks later asking if I would consider a role in testing. I had no idea what testing was, but it proved to be the beginning of my journey. From there I moved to the Ministry of Education where I spent 5 years undertaking a variety of test roles largely with a management focus.
I then moved to Leeds and spent 18 months at EMIS as a test lead. After this I went contracting, commuting to Northampton each week and living in a Travelodge like Alan Partridge.
Since then I've worked to improve my technical and automation skills and have focused on taking roles back in Leeds that allow me to develop these further.
We generally spend around 3 to 4 months planning each event. The bulk of the effort goes into getting the right content and sponsorship. This has become easier owing to our increasing notoriety and now well-established relationship with wharf chambers for the venue, Lean Lunch for the catering and Jon our amazing media human.
Testing is not an activity that is confined to one job role, rather the responsibility of the entire team. Consequently, we welcome anyone who has an interest in testing.
I have worked in testing for around 10 years after finishing University I fell into testing and loved it. I worked in the same place for a long time and was very lucky to be surrounded by some people who taught me a lot and pushed me to develop and grow. I did numerous different things from leading projects, automation, performance testing and even being called a RATs tester at one point! I got involved with the Atelier because I really valued the learnings and support I got from conferences and I wanted to bring this experience to more people.
This helps me grow, it’s easy to get stuck in the bubble of your working environment, attending events gives me the enthusiasm and resources to learn. It also changes my opinion, I like to attend non-testing events also to help me see other perspectives and become a better team member. It can also be nice to sit in a talk and realise that everyone else has the same problem that you have.
It’s very hard to pick one moment, there have been so many good times with a variety of people. My favourite moments are usually when the atelier is about finished, and we have one of our more interactive and fun sessions, e.g. games, testing is pointless, defend the indefensible and presentation karaoke. The atelier is also for me about the people this is when I can relax a bit and see some old friends, make some new ones and have a lot of fun.
Hiya Gabbi! Thanks for interviewing us, I love your work. Sure, I started out in IT Support in 2008 when I first moved to England from Australia. I'd always wanted to work in IT but really struggled to find a way in when I worked in Australia. I spent a lot of my younger years being a sandwich artist, selling shoes and I worked in a call centre for a bit as well, so I was absolutely stoked when I finally got a job in IT. I absolutely bombed the first interview though because I was so excited, luckily, they got me in for another! I really wanted to move into Infrastructure, I was quite obsessed with networks and telephones but unfortunately, I really struggled getting promoted into an Infrastructure role, I saw men that I trained up get promoted ahead of me which really pissed me off. I ended up going for a test role at the company I was at, thebigword as I wasn't going to move up in IT Support - and managed to score the job.
When I was at thebigword, one of the other testers used to go to the Leeds Tester Gatherings so I went with him one night. There was a talk on performance testing there that changed my life - I didn't know about other forms of testing before this and it was so exciting! The Tester Gatherings really opened my eyes in that I knew how to expand my knowledge from there. After hearing about the cool stuff, you could do in testing, I moved to The Test People where I consulted at some awesome places where I could become truly t-shaped. After that, I joined a start-up, FANSZ where I was Tester/Monitoring Specialist and Scrum Master where I made some of the best mates that I've still got… but that went bust. After another job, I've come to Sky where I started as Senior Tester, moved to Test Manager for my sins and now I'm Principal Test Engineer. I was the first Principal Tester that Sky has had - and I'm one of the few lady Principals in all of Sky.
A friendly crowd in a venue with quite punk rock vibes. Lots of learning in a relaxed, friendly space and a fair bit of shouting. Shouting is an integral part of the Test Atelier.
Well, I got goaded into it actually! I was meant to be speaking at the first Test Atelier, but I fell ill and couldn't. The next Atelier was getting set up and Ash, my partner in every way was going to meet up with Ste, Nick and Fred at Crowd of Favours to talk about what they were going to do. On the way, Ash mentioned a venue they were looking at and it was very corporate and not very DIY or punk rock. I said no way can the Atelier be in a corporate venue. We were just around the corner from Wharf, so we popped in, I asked for the keys to the gig room and said what about here? Everyone loved it and it went from there. Originally, we only had the ground floor and then Wharf took over the middle floor, so we expanded it!
Another reason why I though Wharf would be great was its very LGBTQ+ friendly. I wanted to ensure that everyone felt like they were welcome, no matter who they make out with or who they identify as. I spent a lot of time in the music/queer scene and I wanted to bring that to the tech scene. The DIY music scene has been around for a long time, there's a lot that we can learn from it in putting on an awesome, punk rock testing conference.
Hey Nick, can you introduce yourself and give us a brief synopsis of your Test career so far…
Graduated from university after studying Maths and Statistics - nothing to do with my testing career but thought I’d get that one in their coz it makes my mum proud. I then applied for graduate jobs around the North of England, ending up getting a graduate test analyst role. Had 2 months training funded by CallCredit and spent 2.5 more years there learning a lot. Whilst there I was fortunate enough to meet most of the other organisers of the Atelier and am pleased to say I helped start the original Leeds testing unconference/atelier. Over a year ago I moved to Sky Betting and Gaming to experience life in a more familiar domain and a different working culture.
Working in my first role I was surrounded by testers that were actively getting involved in community meetups, so I decided to head along. Coming from University I was used to a social life style so wanted to carry that on in my working life, luckily others had the same idea and were very welcoming to new people. The company that did my initial 2 months training also invested in meet ups and hosted them - big thanks to the companies that invest back into the community, you the real mvp.
Having friends that you can regular chat with about anything - testing, football, travelling, basically just life in general. Life can become scary moving out of your comfort zone into something completely new but is made a lot easier when you can regularly meet up with likeminded people.
Hi Gabbi,
Sure! I'm a 28-year-old Software Engineer in Test working over in skybet. My testing career began when I left De-Montfort university with an HND in software engineering. A friend of mine ended up sending me a RAF for a job with EMIS up in Leeds. I felt it was a great opportunity (and it turned out I was a really bad phones salesman) so I grabbed it with both hands. I ended up doing plenty of manual testing there whilst skilling up in c# and .net and, eventually, I became a SEIT. Moving through different teams I learned all different aspects of the business as well as how to write automated tests in codedui. I also getting involved in writing and reviewing unit tests and the odd cheeky bit of code. Eventually I ended up moving to skybet in pursuit of new challenges and technologies. I'd say my current role sort of sits between developer and test, I could be learning how to deploy to rancher environments, writing test automation, working directly on the applications themselves. basically, I do whatever needs to be done with the rest of my team.
I would say one of my favourites was Jit Gosai's talk on balancing risk vs value. To me, it was a fantastic way of visually and kinaesthetically demonstrating how targeting your testing on areas of high risk allow you to make changes to a system with a better degree of confidence that you haven't caused further issues! As someone who can have trouble grasping concepts in words alone, that workshop of his was helpful and extremely well-done
Choosing speakers is very much a team effort, but pretty much all our speakers come in from the same place which is our our call for papers page (Shameless plug: https://testingatelier.community/callforpapers). When something comes through we like, someone will shout up about it and we will pretty much agree to put them on. There are a bunch of different things we look for in talks, a lot of times if you have the same people saying the same things then an echo chamber can from which is something we aren't too keen on. So new and interesting viewpoints are always welcome! new speakers are also a big thing for us, we very much want to encourage people who have less public speaking experience to get out there and give it a go! we also like a good bit of controversy too! Anything that sounds fun or interesting, we're probably down for!
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