"Alarm Pain" - Experiences with painful vs effective test automation.

Since there's only a handful of folks interested in reading the book, we're going to focus on a major theme from chapters 1-4 in the book, but turn the meeting into a pain-centric Mastery Circle discussion, so reading won't be a requirement for participation.

Since the first major theme in the book is about how my team conquered the challenges of ineffective test automation, it's a great opportunity to compare and contrast our experiences.

Have you ever had an experience with test automation where the maintenance became so painful, you considered abandoning the approach? How often do your tests catch bugs versus just need repair? What strategies and techniques have you learned to minimize the pain?

First, I'll do a brief overview during the first 5-min to describe the format of the discussion, and the new vocabulary we'll be using in the discussion from Idea Flow (leanpub.com/ideaflow) to discuss our experiences with "Alarm Pain".

Next, we'll brainstorm key lessons learned stories with test maintenance from our personal experience, either a painful experience or a contrasting effective one.

We'll focus on one story at a time and dig into the details with questions, trying to figure out what were the major factors that caused the pain (or lack of pain), then share our conclusions at the end, and look for patterns across experiences.

After the meetup, we'll carry the discussion over to Open Mastery Slack, and continue discussion, identifying patterns, and capturing key lessons learned as short stories with #hashtagged patterns.

Our goal is to get really good at distilling, codifying, and sharing our knowledge as a community, and turn each meetup into the awesomest learning experience imaginable.

Hope to see you there!