Do you gather?

There is that old saying "a rolling stone gathers no moss", well yeah, because its like...uhm...moving and stuff.  If you sat around and let your bones and skills ossify you might find there is a bit of moss somewhere, or something else, of course it all depends on your location.  Because its nice to get people together and discuss something about your work, I started a monthly talk here about 9 months ago, and its worked out pretty well.

Why I did it was to give a place where everyone who was in QA, and in Development, could get together and hear a short presentation on a topic then have a roundtable to see if there were ideas of ways to use this in our own environment.  Development used to have a bi-weekly meeting to go over some new programming concept, cool widget or what have you, and while they were great to get in on they did not have much bearing on my day to day work.  Now I can actually come to a subject that is revolving around some facet of testing I do, make a presentation about it, instruct others who might derive some benefit and maybe talk about ways to improve it.  This has been nice, and we've had some good discussions and while I like to keep the presentations down to 20 minutes max, with the rest of the time for discussion, when the VP of our division came to the one on Agile and Scrum that lasted about an hour and a half as questions continually came up.  That one was great because it allowed us to look at ways to improve the process we had on a recently started major project, I am glad to say that we also adopted the information radiator concept and each of the three major sites have a weekly radiation dose of information on the state of the project.

Topics are open to all, and we've had some presentations from Documentation, on test tools like QuickTest, Virutalization on Linux, Debugging methods on our products and we have more planned for this year on Quality and API Testing.  It's great, allows people to brush up on presentation skills on a friendly audience, and gives some great opportunites for information dissemination.

Of course if you are ambitious and can do them offsite at your favorite restaurant or brewpub, more power to you!