I’ve mentioned before that I tend to dislike conference sessions which are participatory, preferring instead experience reports that I can take the lessons-learned and recontextualize them. So it was somewhat ironic that my session at Agile was specific type of workshop called an Art Show.

An Art Show is when the audience become the artists and the session room the gallery. This means that you cover the walls with audience created ‘art’. I first heard about this style of session from Michael Bolton with his Heuristics Art Show.

The theme for this art show was the many hats Agile Testers wear in their job. It is my experience, and it has been backed up by conversations with others over the week, is that the developers on an Agile team tend to just do development. And the testers to everything else, in addition to testing. (Okay, maybe not everything else, but a lot more.) I wanted to see if the hats other testers wear were similar to mine, or if there was a wide range of them.

The answer turns out to be yes; to both questions. The way we found this out was to break one of the cardinal rules of art galleries — we touched the art. Or more correctly, we put stickers on the art. Each person put stickers on the ‘hats’ thy identified with.

Speaking of the art, I took pictures of them after the session. I had a brand new camera and unfortunately it kinda shows in the quality of the photos. Some lessons, like learn to use your tools before you need them, need to be learned and re-learned over and over.

Overall though, I think the session went well and achieved the objectives I had hoped. The feedback (from the 1/4 of the room that bothered to submit it) also seems to bear that out. Part Two will be my thoughts on the actual list of hats and their totals (now that I’ve got them sorted).

Here are the slides I used and the totals of the hats.

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  • Detective / Inspector – 13
  • Firefighter – 11
  • Problem Solver – 11
  • Wizard / Fool / Jester – 9
  • Customer – 9
  • Negotiator / Mediator – 9
  • Examiner – 8
  • Realist – 7
  • Teacher – 7
  • Tightrope Walker – 6
  • Explorer – 5
  • Student – 4
  • Writer – 4
  • Maintainer of Systems – 4
  • Police – 4
  • Boy Who Cried Environment Discrepancies – 4
  • Meeting Facilitator – 4
  • Nurse (to stop the bleeding) – 4
  • Encourager / Rewarder – 4
  • Scrum Master – 4
  • Film Critic – 3
  • Process ‘dude’ – 3
  • Quality Assurance (Assistance) – 3
  • Historian – 3
  • Aggregator / Distiller of Knowledge – 3
  • Leader – 3
  • Proactive Big Picture Thinker – 3
  • Harbinger of Doom – 3
  • IT Infrastructure Liaison – 3
  • Football Helmet (to protect your head when banging it against the wall) – 3
  • Geek – 3
  • IT / Tech Support – 3
  • Business Analyst – 2
  • (Impartial) Code Reviewer – 2
  • Sociopath – 2
  • Propagandist – 2
  • Communications Coach – 2
  • Too big hat (and others trying to wear it at the same time) – 2
  • UI Designer – 2
  • Wrestler – 1
  • Examiner – 1
  • Cowboy – 1
  • Lion Tamer – 1
  • Fly Fishing hat (has lots of stuff going on) – 1
  • Unit tester – 1
  • Umpire – 0
  • Hard Hat (protects from danger) – 0
  • With a fan (to keep you cool) – 0
  • Upside-down hat (think creatively) – 0
  • Project Manager – 0
  • Record Keeper – 0