Every professional is continually working to enhance their skill set to keep up with the new changes coming up in the form of new technologies and methodologies. For this purpose, an organisation should give an opportunity where people can learn and develop new skills. One widespread practice growing rapidly in various IT organisations is setting up regular meetings among multiple teams and discussing new ideas, experiences and technologies. These meetings or gatherings are termed, Guilds.
A guild is a group of people with similar interests who share knowledge among them, such as The tester Guild, Scrum Masters Guilds, etc. A primary goal of the guild is to discuss new technologies, share experiences and build a network of people who can be in the same organisation or from outside. In this article, let’s talk about what is a testing guild.
A testing guild is a term for sessions where testers from different product/project teams gather simultaneously in one place and discuss their testing-related learnings and new technologies. These sessions can be held at one location or different locations due to distance and time. The important point to note here is testing guilds can also have developers, scrum masters or product owners.
Below are some benefits which management will get as an outcome of these sessions:
• These sessions will grow cross-team relationships between testers working for different teams.
• People who attend external testing guild sessions will eventually share the knowledge with internal teams, which will help in enhancing skills.
The frequency of testing guild sessions can be once a month, and all don't need to attend the meeting. However, professionals can be asked to attend sessions as a trial and later, if they find these interesting, they will willingly join these sessions.
The testing guild session will have people from different teams. It is always a good idea to allow the new person to present the session — this way new concepts and ideas can be discussed. Also, it will allow every guild member to share their knowledge and skills. Everyone will contribute; one time, a tester can present a testing technique, and the next time, someone else can present a product or application. This practice will result in a wide range of topics being discussed, and if one presenter cannot make it on time, another person can present a new concept.
Guild sessions can be arranged locally or distributed as the day’s organisations work in multiple locations with different teams. Both types of arrangements have their advantages and disadvantages. Local guild sessions are easy to arrange, and people participate more actively, resulting in effective knowledge exchange. Whereas distributed guild sessions have time and hardware dependencies. Set up can be challenging for distributed guild sessions, but as multiple locations and people are involved, ideas and concepts range. Eventually, It will lead to the growth of the relationship between different teams.
Building a testing guild and arranging the meetings is a continuous process. Here people can share knowledge, tools, code, and practices not only during sessions but through online portals, for example, Yammer, LinkedIn, Google+ etc. It will help in keeping the interest intact and sharing materials among themselves.
Testing guild sessions allow learning more about other fields like development and products and vice versa. Guild sessions are all about sharing and exchanging knowledge and learning new things. With new technologies like continuous integration, testing and delivery, it is always essential to know about development as the gap between testing and development is decreasing.
Elevate IT can help you set up a testing guild and start the sessions. Please get in touch with us for more info.