And so we did.

In January we held live networking event followed by the first Weekend Testing Toronto session online. Continuing ideas from my previous posts, I set up Trello board and created mission statement.

Purpose

The purpose of the session is practical assessment of Trello tool as a long-term medium (whereas Skype is short-term medium) for collaboration sessions and projects performed in the context of Weekend Testing.

Value Propositions

• Greater online visibility
  • Boards and cards indexed by search engines
  • Quick and easy to refer in Social Media
• Enabled transparency
  • Participants
  • Engagement and contribution
  • Session structure
  • Results
  • Showcasing
• Flexible options for structuring of the sessions
  • Session planning and preparation can start in advance
  • Decks and cards allow clear definition of key elements
• Enabled scalability
  • Team: easier to organize in testing pairs and workgroups
  • Time: boards as a medium help to retain progress for multiple sessions
  • Breadth and depth: boards as a medium help to connect multiple sessions tackling different aspects of the product
• Enabled continuity
  • Scalability options allow for session-based projects
  • ..as well as for distributed sessions working with the same board
  • ..as well as mix of online and offline sessions
• Increased learning and training value
  • Well-structured and transparent boards/cards are a long-standing example
  • The boards might be copied to reuse existing structure and build upon it
• Reducing administration overhead
  • Reusable structure elements allow WT facilitators to spend mode time actually designing the sessions
  • Participants have an opportunity to post their contributions directly

Those statements were targeted as claims, and attendance allowed to make 2 testing groups.

Discussions were captured both through Skype chat and comments on Trello cards – the latter also allowed testing of concurrent and simultaneous aspects.

Reports are available online: Workgroup 1, Workgroup 2. And so is the overall feedback gathered via Skype chat: Session Feedback.

Overall, I can say that for the first session it went better than I expected but with less than I wanted.

I definitely will keep using Trello boards for Weekend Testing sessions. But I was surprised by the lack of interest from session participants – this opportunity to add to one’s professional online identify didn’t seem to be appealing. Or maybe it’ll just take some time to pick up.