Test Bash Manchester 2017 Tweet by Tweet

I was very fortunate that I was able to attend my second ever Test Bash in Manchester. This year was better than last year as two of my co-workers (Hannah & Jack) came along for the ride. I got so excited seeing them get excited!

I spent most of the conference day scribbling notes again. However unlike last year where I mostly wrote text in a pad. This year I had plain paper and used coloured pens. At the open space the following day it was really nice to have my notes from the conference day to hand. In the days following the conference these visual reminders really helped important ideas stick in my head.

I sent all my visual notes up into the Twitter-verse as they were completed. List of tweets below.

Anne-Marie Charrett @charrett Quality != Testing

Notes taken during talk by Anne-Marie Charrett @charrett Quality != Testing at #TestBash Manchester pic.twitter.com/4a3ZXK5LkV

— Rosie Hamilton 🌈🦄 (@Rosicadia) October 27, 2017

Goran Kero @ghkero What I, A Tester, Have Learnt From Studying Psychology

@ghkero What I, a tester have learned from studying psychology. #testbash pic.twitter.com/KMz7M6SYKn

— Rosie Hamilton 🌈🦄 (@Rosicadia) October 27, 2017

Gem Hill @Gem_Hill AUT: Anxiety Under Test

I really admire your bravery @Gem_Hill Powerful talk on anxiety, mental health and coping with confrontation #TestBash pic.twitter.com/3cyuPRbZRY

— Rosie Hamilton 🌈🦄 (@Rosicadia) October 27, 2017

Bas Dijkstra @_basdijkstra Who Will Guard the Guards Themselves? How to Trust Your Automation and Avoid Deceit

@_basdijkstra talking about avoiding deceit in automation. It's all about trust #TestBash pic.twitter.com/kIOcHsAVdC

— Rosie Hamilton 🌈🦄 (@Rosicadia) October 27, 2017

James Sheasby Thomas @RightSaidJames Accessibility Testing Crash Course

Notes on accessibility testing from James Sheasby Thomas @RightSaidJames It's important to use the software like ALL users will use it #TestBash pic.twitter.com/IRlaWM8ity

— Rosie Hamilton 🌈🦄 (@Rosicadia) October 27, 2017

Vera Gehlen-Baum @VeraGeBa Turning Good Testers Into Great Ones

@VeraGeBa Turning Good Testers into Great Ones with Metacognition. Knowledge, Self-Regulation & monitoring #TestBash pic.twitter.com/pfMqow2gni

— Rosie Hamilton 🌈🦄 (@Rosicadia) October 27, 2017

Simon Dobson Lessons Learnt Moving to Microservices

Lessons learned moving to micro services from Simon Dobson #TestBash pic.twitter.com/52OXcFkrVY

— Rosie Hamilton 🌈🦄 (@Rosicadia) October 27, 2017

Martin Hynie @vds4 The Lost Art of the Journeyman

The lost art of the journey person. Testing is a craft, the testing community will need to evolve. Martin Hynie @vds4 #TestBash pic.twitter.com/GwH6Lykmsg

— Rosie Hamilton 🌈🦄 (@Rosicadia) October 27, 2017

Claire Reckless @clairereckless The Fraud Squad - Learning to manage Impostor Syndrome as a Tester

@clairereckless Learning to manage imposter syndrome. Comparison is the thief of joy #TestBash pic.twitter.com/PAJ7gPygP7

— Rosie Hamilton 🌈🦄 (@Rosicadia) October 27, 2017

Michael Bolton @michaelbolton Where Do you Want To Go Today? No More Exploratory Testing

No more exploratory testing by @michaelbolton Save the kittens! No more 'test cases' no more 'manual testing' That rap is going to stay with me forever. #TestBash pic.twitter.com/v1eIH9MDry

— Rosie Hamilton 🌈🦄 (@Rosicadia) October 27, 2017

Twitter Mining

Last year, I did some Twitter mining and sentiment analysis after the event. I wanted to re-use those scripts again to tell this year's story. After I got home (and had a bath and good rest) I sat down with my laptop and mined 2700 tweets out of Twitter on the hashtag #testbash. I worked through my code from last year starting to piece together the story of this year's event. If you're interested in the code that this article is based upon, it can be found (along with the raw data) here on Git Hub

Positive and negative word clouds

The word clouds above can be clicked for a larger image. The first thing I noticed after generating some positive and negative word clouds was that the positive cloud was bigger than the negative cloud. 173 unique positive words and 125 unique negative words were identified in the conference day tweets. The conference was a resoundingly positive event!

It didn't surprised me that the word 'Great' was at the center of the positive word cloud. Having done this kind of text crunching a few times now I've learned that 'great' and 'talk' are generally two of the most common words tweeted at conference events. What did surprise me though was the negative word cloud. Right at the center, the most frequently used negative word 'syndrome' closely followed by 'anxiety'. Claire Reckless & Gem Hill spoke about imposter syndrome and anxiety. Both these talks had a huge impact on the Twitter discussions which were taking place on the day. Getting the testing community talking about imposter syndrome and anxiety, even though the words used carry negative sentiments, is a very positive outcome.

The top 5 most favourited tweets were:

#1

And it’s official. #TestBash Munich is back in 2018. Save the date. September 14th 2018!!! pic.twitter.com/Z9RTHYU7Ie

— Patrick Prill (@TestPappy) October 27, 2017

#2

Like, seriously, wow. All the attendees of #TestBash Manchester today, you all rock, wow, thank you all. Blown away.

— Richard Bradshaw (@FriendlyTester) October 27, 2017

#3

Impostor Syndrome by @clairereckless at #TestBash So recognizable & yet hard to hear about it again. Thank you Clair. I needed to hear this pic.twitter.com/uuRC8npn7S

— Marianne (@marianneduijst) October 27, 2017

#4

Thanks for my "come and say hi" T-shirt @FriendlyTester and @SJ_Deery! #TestBash pic.twitter.com/iSgcp9Nj7b

— Cassandra H. Leung (@Tweet_Cassandra) October 27, 2017

#5

Here's the slides and the content for my #TestBash 'Accessibility Testing Crash Course' talk! #a11y @ministryoftesthttps://t.co/qO5p2zZBDI

— James Sheasby Thomas (@RightSaidJames) October 27, 2017

Tweets by Time and Positivity

A number representing positivity index was calculated for each tweet. For every word in the tweet present in a dictionary of positive words, the tweet scored +1. For every word in the tweet present in a dictionary of negative words, the tweet scored - 1. The positive and negative words list used to score tweets was created by Minquing Hu and Bing Liu at the University of Illinois and can be found here

The tweet with the most positive sentiment on the day was this one from Richard Bradshaw

Like, seriously, wow. All the attendees of #TestBash Manchester today, you all rock, wow, thank you all. Blown away.

— Richard Bradshaw (@FriendlyTester) October 27, 2017

The tweet with the most negative sentiment on the day was this one from Dan Billing.

What are your triggers? I get anxious losing things, I'm forgetful and clumsy. #anxiety #TestBash @Gem_Hill pic.twitter.com/kC4EO4rdFm

— Dan Billing (@TheTestDoctor) October 27, 2017

I plotted all the tweets by time and positivity then fitted a loess curve through the points on the scatter plot.

The first thing that really stood out was that one tester was up, awake and tweeting a picture of the venue at 4:17am?!?

Venue for #testbash later on today. https://t.co/hC4VquzEnR pic.twitter.com/7SZNJ8gUFv

— tzb | Stu (@tzb) October 27, 2017

Once the event got started, there was a dip in positivity just after 10:00am - Checking some of the tweets around that time

The irony of suffering from confirmation bias when doing research about confirmation bias @ghkero #TestBash pic.twitter.com/O7YG14aqkM

— Heather Reid (@heather_reiduff) October 27, 2017

To understand confirmation bias you must first understand confirmation bias 😂 #TestBash @ghkero

— Dan Billing (@TheTestDoctor) October 27, 2017

Reason for the dip is related to tweets about bias.

There was another dip in positivity just after 16:00 so I checked those tweets too.

People with imposter syndrome fear both failure and success - this is a stressful situation to be in! @clairereckless #testbash pic.twitter.com/M5g2GemWcc

— tzb | Stu (@tzb) October 27, 2017

Those suffering from impostor syndrome have a fear of failure... and a fear of success! #yup @clairereckless #TestBash pic.twitter.com/fH4L1ERs0H

— Neil Studd (@neilstudd) October 27, 2017

Again, nothing negative was happening, the dip in positivity was caused by the discussion of a subject which has a negative sentiment.

Really positive tweets came at the end of the day once the event had been absorbed. With the last part of the day carrying the most positive sentiment

Home and chilling after a truly remarkable two days. #testbash has exceeded all my expectations. Thank you @ministryoftest @FriendlyTester

— Matthew Parker (@TestingTackled) October 27, 2017

Tweets by Frequency and Platform

I plotted a frequency polygon broken down by platform to see which parts of the day people engaged the most with Twitter. Again the image below can be clicked for a larger version.

It was very interesting to see how frequently people were tweeting through out the day. The spikes in activity align very closely with the start of each talk. It was also nice to see people taking a break from using twitter on mobile phones over lunch (hopefully this is because real face to face conversations were happening over a meal). The biggest spike of activity happened immediately after lunch time was over during Vera Gehlen-Baum's talk "Turning Good Testers Into Great Ones".

It was a pleasure connecting so many wonderful people at this event. The mix of new faces and familiar faces was fantastic. Test community is the best community ♥ Hopefully see you in Brighton next year!