Guild Days for QA. Who are they for… and why?
Why do we need Guild Days? For whom? And how can we make it?
Aleksandra Pervunina, QA Engineer at Wix.com
Image by You X Ventures on Unsplash
Let’s begin with a few words about the term “guild.” At Wix, each specialist is part of both a team and a guild. A team usually works on a single product or on a set of projects. It’s like a small company inside a large one — that’s why each team can have their own front-end engineers, back-end engineers, QA specialists, and so on. A guild is an association of people brought together by their field of expertise. There are plenty of guilds at Wix, such as the front-end guild, the back-end guild, and the QA guild. Within those guilds, we try to share experience and knowledge with each other. You can read more about the types of Guild Days that we put together as part of the QA Guild in my previous article.
Guild days demystified
Usually there are Core teams in each Guild, which work with different teams, tools, approaches, programming languages, etc. Our QA Guild has more than 150 QA Engineers in three locations — Tel Aviv and Beer Sheva (Israel), Kyiv and Dnipro (Ukraine), Vilnius (Lithuania) and Phoenix, Arizona (USA). The QA Guild is lucky because we’re able to find time for all of us to come together for knowledge and experience sharing, and to work on challenges that team members have. It is a good opportunity to tell each other your problems, tasks, and projects that you are working on.
How do we make it happen?
Our local history began in 2018 in Dnipro, when we decided to gather offline with all of QA for some lectures, workshops and demos — and for pizza, of course ;)
Pic. 1. QA Guild Day. Lecture about a Flash project at Wix. November, 2019
Pic. 2. QA Guild Day. Product Guild. What a Product can tell QA. March, 2020
But a year ago our world changed and went into an online regime because of the quarantine. And we faced a challenge of switching to an online format for the education Guild Days. We chose Zoom as did many other teams. And although it brought its limitations, at the same time it rallied us and pushed us to start sharing knowledge online with all of our QA Engineers — from Israel, Ukraine and Lithuania. The number of people in the guild is always growing and so the number of attendees has been increasing with each time — thus presenting in English is now a requirement and our topics became wider — we talk about technical and soft skills, about tools, approaches and methodologies, psychology, etc.
As an example, here are some stats for our Guild Days in a Monday board (we use it to manage Guild Days) where we’ve collected all photos, presentations and recordings from the past 3 years :)
Our board always looks like this:
So, where can you start?
- First of all, think about the topic for the future Guild Day. It should for sure fit the needs of your team members. To learn about people’s interests you can send a questionnaire to your colleagues. That would be the first step done. Relevant topic found.
- Second step is to find a speaker in this area / field who would want to give a speech and prepare a presentation for QA people. You can search inside your own team or company, or even invite someone from outside! For me the most important criteria for a speaker are his/her good knowledge in some particular field and their public speaking skills — ability to put together and give interesting and engaging presentations.
- Third step is the most difficult, yet at the same time most exciting for me — discuss the topic and agree with the speaker on a detailed agenda and content. If you have some doubts about that content — do not hesitate to send a form with questions to your colleagues again — about what it is they want to hear about from that speaker.
You can adjust not just contents, but also the type of a Guild Day, of course. It can have a lecture format, or it can be a one day workshop, or a bug hunt, or an overview, or a round table (Brainstorming) or even a live-coding session!
We have now delved even deeper into the topic! We discussed different Guilds inside Wix, different teams and QA challenges inside them. For example, in the past we had presentations about Product, UX, Server Guild at Wix, a big one-day Security Workshop, and a lecture about QA challenges inside the POS team of the Stores Company.
And last but not least — agree on the language that will be used during the Guild Day. If you’re working on an international Guild Day — it must be English. If it is only for the Ukrainian section of QA — Ukrainian or Russian.
This most complicated step always comprises a few syncs, meetings and, of course, dry runs with speakers to make their presentation more useful, interesting or fun for people!
Of course, force majeure happens. So, you should always plan to have free “slots” and some “extra” topics to change the Guild Day topic and speaker. And for sure, you should document your thoughts, ideas, and future plans so as to not to forget anything. Always get the most important information documented: the plan of your Guild Day, the structure of each of them and most common topics. It makes your life easier and decreases your preparation time with future events.
And for sure, always think about timing — because people can have vacations, sick leaves, etc. — especially when you work in an international company with teams distributed in different time zones and countries with different national holidays schedules.
4. Fourth step! It is the speaker’s promotion. What does this mean? At the basic level it’s sending a Google calendar invitation with all the info about upcoming events — timing, agenda, a short topic overview. Bot that can be even more — sending some big and colorful email (Shout Out) about the speaker — his / her hobby, time at your company, team, expertise, real passion about something, etc. ;)
5. Fifth step — of course, the Guild Day with the presentation itself. Always make a video recording of the event (doesn’t matter if it is an online or an offline format). And after the event always send out a Feedback Form to all participants to make the next event better!
Q&A
Let me share answers to some of the most common questions I receive related to the Guild days organisation process in a Q&A format:
- How often are Guild Days?
Usually once per week (around 3–4 times per month).
- Who are the participants?
These can be your colleagues, team members inside a team, or even all people inside the Guild.
- Who can this help and how?
First of all, it can help newcomers who just started working at your company. Watching a video recording of a workshop about a programmer language, QA tools, methodologies, etc., can save their and your time and will help go deeper into a specific knowledge inside your team that should be known.
- What are the goals of having Guild days?
It’s an excellent opportunity for all QA people to get some new knowledge and to apply it to their day-to-day work.
The aim of each Guild Day is education. We enrich our own knowledge base Wiki with video recordings and photos and presentations from past events. And of course, it’s a great platform to prepare for a presentation at a different QA conference, meetup or event, and also an opportunity to write your own article and then post it to Twitter, Medium, Facebook, etc.
Lastly, we put together QA Guild Days because of all the social networking and building a personal branding for the future that happens there.
Conclusion
By organizing such days for training, lectures and workshops, you will give an opportunity to each tester in your team to improve their skills, gain and give others new knowledge that can later be used in daily work on the project. This is another opportunity for team building at work. And also a possibility to boost the process of finding new ideas, and solutions to many problems that are lingering around the team.
Think about the possibility of allocating just 1–3 hours of your team’s time per week to organizing these lectures, workshops, or to just brainstorming. In the future this will help improve the skills of your employees, which eventually results in improved quality of the products, certain boost to the efficiency of testing processes, and to a minimized number of bugs in production.
