“For me the end of the year is always a time to reflect and recharge my energies.”
Gisele Bundchen
Let’s take a moment and reflect about 2021 and recharge my energy !
In this blog post, I wanted to share with you my reflections, memories and some of the things that comes to my mind about my year.
In 2020, while doing my year review, I find out that it’s time for me to change my job after 4 years in the same company, it doesn’t respond to what I really want to do. I took few weeks reflecting about it seriously and then I decided to make it even a bigger adventure. It wasn’t an easy decision to say good bye to my friends and dear colleagues, no one expected it from me.
So I ended the last quadrant of the year not just by changing the job, also changing the country “moving from my home city Sfax, Tunisia to Lille, France” and also changing my position.
As a Testing Consultant, my mission is “QA Coach”, it’s my first time in transversal role where I learn about the way testing is done in the whole organization, how everyone is contributing to build quality and what are the things that could be improved in the processes to accelerate the delivery of shippable quality.
So lot of changes, and I’m very thankful to everyone who encouraged me or gave me advice to initiate my new adventure dealing with all those transformations at once.
Let’s go back from the first quadrant of the year till its end so that I can share some of my achievements in no particular order that make me proud and happy.
- Contributed to the translation of Agile Testing Condensed to French with Benjamin Butel
- Attended to some 99 min workshop via ministry oftesting which allowed me to learn new things related to testing
- Releasing the 21st Century Skills For Testers book with Ard Kramer, and by making a twist “publishing it on the 21st January 2021”, you can find about it via our hashtag on social media #21stskills4testers
- Took the plane again for the first time since the start of the pandemic
- Shared some sketchnotes via #emnanotes, thanks to my colleagues for their feedback that helped me improve the way I took sketchnotes, I still miss the speed to make nice real time sketchnotes, it will certainly come with more practice.
- Organized online 2 meetups via Sfax Ministry of Testing, special thanks to Aine and the whole MOT team for her support.
- MoT Sfax Meetup #9: My journey Shifting My Testing Left by @testninja77
- MoT Sfax Meetup #8: Design Patterns for High-Quality Automated Tests by @angelovstanton
- Had the chance to meet lot of online friends for the first time during #JFTL and #AgileTD onsite conference.
- Joined ministry of Testing Lille as an organizer with @ThomasKuypers.
- Recorded some rackets, like a short podcast, it’s a good way for me to try speaking without necessarly preparing what I’ll talk about
- Said “NO” to many invites via online friends or the testing communities although 3 years ago, it was a dream for me to start speaking at meetups or conferences. sorry for that rejection from my side but I couldn’t go further beyond my capacities.
- Had 4 months break between 2 jobs, I felt like I need this period to relax and finish some of the open challenges.
- Had a great summer vacation from June to August with family and eating lot of delicious food.
2021 in Numbers
To summarize the year in numbers
- 2 books
- 2 meetups within MOT
- 27 blogs posted
- 9 pairing opportunities where I interviewed testers across the globe into #testerstory so that they shared their experience how they joined the world of testing and how was their journey.
- 13 conference talks and other online events in the following countries (USA, Portugal, Tunisia, Belgium, France, Germany, China, Brazil, Uruguay, Georgia, India, Switzerland, Netherlands, UK) including 2 in person (Potsdam, Germany and Paris, France)
- 2 meetups done internally within Sogeti Lille
- 1 international meetup between Sogeti Netherlands and Sogeti France
- 1 podcast via ministry of testing: TestSphere Roulette hosted by Simon Prior with David Maynard and me
- 12 games related to software testing ang quality engineering added to my list
- +1 decade; reached my 30’ies 🙂 and I hope the next decade will be exciting !
- +10000 visitors to my blog
- 21520 views on my blog
More About My New Work Adventure at Sogeti
Happy with my decision that I joined Sogeti, specially within the ENGAGE TEAM, great place where we learn from each other and get inspired by our colleagues working as consultants for different clients. which makes the exchanges within communities so interesting, every month at least one meetup is planned. I got the chance to attend some of the meetups organized internally in Lille, also the national ones organized by Jeremy where consultants share their experience how they make the audit of testing processes within organization and how they manage the transformation to help clients build a quality culture.
I even get the chance to facilitate an international meetup when Q-meets community of Sogeti Netherands invited me to run a presentation and a workshop Gamify your testing and we did it between NL and FR communities.
Also, my colleagues did an excellent workshop by the end of the year
- Process Communication Model (PCM) by Maxime we learned more about our own personality which could improve dealing with strengths and weaknesses in conscious way. It’s also a way to recognize different motivations and behaviour under stress which is a great tool to improve leadership and communication skills. It’s a good new tip about the #21stskills4testers.
- Visual facilitation workshop by Mickael where I got the chance to learn new tips to make better sketchnotes and improve my visualization.
Thank you Vincent for all your efforts making the team even more enaged and open to new learnings and fruitful exchanges between consultants.
During Agile Testing Days conference in Germany last month, I got the chance to meet 4 like minded colleagues from other Sogeti around the world, which motivated me even more to see how enthusiastic and passionate about testing we are.
I also joined the internal Sogeti testing community as one of the agitators (as Dimitri call it “Agitateurs de la communauté” who did an excellent work organizing lot of exchanges between consultants and he try his best to connect consultants who have the same challenges at client sides to pair together, I even got the chance recently to pair with Salma she is also started recently the same kind of tasks I’m doing and we get interesting exchanges).
Worst Moment in 2021
I invited 3 of my Tunisian friends in Lille to go into Escape Room and make a new adventure, we were so excited about the plan and it will be my first time trying this game, we booked and paied online in advance, all of us looking forward to try “Braquage à la Lilloise” at Escapers.
The day of the game I arrived 30 min before the start of the session, I discovered that my sanity pass is no longer valid but no notifcation was sent to me, I was using it since september without any issue !
It seems that the rules changed during that week regarding the Janssen type vaccine, all my friends hold a valid pass. He told us would you like to play 3 of you ? we asked if we can delay it to another day, he explained the case to his manager and tell us to send an email to him. He didn’t say that there will be no chances to get replacement.
His answer was very frustrating, he said that it was our choice to not play the 3 of us, and that he can’t provide any replacement which means that we paied but no service was provided to us.
I’m very surprised with this behaviour and how cold they are to welcome people.
I’m sharing this stupid experience to say how different were the last 2 years with the pandemic that changed many ways of working and people still need to learn to adapt wisely to those changes.
Hope it has at least one single benefit in everyone one of you.
Best Moment in 2021
My best moment was when I finally checked the place I always wanted to visit and on my bucket list for years, yessss! finally visited the capbon of tunisia and explored different beaches in the area, very special, beautiful and having had great time with my family.
Happy New Year 2022
Here I come to the end of this blog post, I wish you all my family, friends and dear followers a very happy new year 2022 full of joy, health and success.
I also hope that this year will bring me more positive vibes and be the start of new adventures, and hopefully many trips to discover new places. Let’s hope no more lockdowns 🙂
I have some personal objectives like travelling and exploring the world beauty … and reading the books I already bought or got this year but didn’t finish (or even to start) them.
Another open challenge on my “wish list” is to create a game related to testing and quality, having some ideas let’s hope for 2022 or 2023 🙂 STAY TUNED and follow my collection of games !
This is my third time in row doing a year in review in blog format, I highly recommend it to everyone!
It allows you to see your achievements, highlights of the year and also an opportunity to fix new challlenges (personal or professional).
Special thanks to my family and my friends for their support and encouragement to initiate a new challenging journey.
Thank you for reading my blog, happy to see such interest from fellow readers. Any feedback is welcome 🙂 you can reach out to me via twitter.
Emna Ayadi 