Live recording about the Dragons Out book and book excerpt

Giving a keynote speech is a pleasant task but even more thrilling is to talk about my project "Dragons Out" and how has it all come together, with ups and downs. I gave the keynote at RTC online 2020 conference. The presentation was also sent live to Youtube and Facebook, and you can watch the live recording here.

In the presentation, I discussed how children learn and why have I chosen the approach of storytelling to teach children the art of software testing. I then discussed the book project timeline, also touching the emotional timeline I've experienced. Then I explained how testing concepts come alive with analogies of fantasy stories, using dragons, knights, children, villagers etc. This last part will eventually evolve into a free PowerPoint slide deck about testing for all the teachers in the world to use.

There was also a drawing competition. Each participant got to draw their own dragon, representing a defect, and send the photo of the dragon to me by email. The best picture will receive a free copy of the English version of Dragons Out book. The winner is Mihai Marinescu! The publisher hasn't announced the publishing date yet, but it won't be too long. 

Remember to preorder my book at https://www.dragonsout.com/p/preorder-dragons-out-book.html

If you care to look at the slides of the presentation, they are in SlideShare here

As the RTC Online conference was about diversity, too, and all of us being super-(s)heroes of software testing, I think this excerpt from the Dragons Out book is very apt:

Laura and Tom often climbed on top of the new wall surrounding Iron Lake village . They looked out for dragons, as they had done during the construction of the wall. They honed their archery skills during daily exercises, and the village guard took them along for drills with wooden swords. Life was nice. At school, they learned languages, reading, and math. A knight would need a diverse education. You don’t defeat dragons by mere swordsmanship. The youngsters realized that they could achieve much more through cooperation and prevention. The importance of new perspectives had dawned on them in Mountain City when they had come up with a new way of vanquishing a dragon.

Laura and Tom understand the importance of diverse competence. The same thing applies to the world of software testing. A single tester, and especially a team together, need a wealth of knowledge and skills to test the software thoroughly. This knowledge includes an understanding of testing techniques, the software under test, users, and the structure of the software, such as the programming language used. Many testers know how to code in a programming language, though they may be better at testing than coding. That coding skill also helps with better testing, especially with test automation, which is also code.





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