This is a Lightning Talk which I prepared for the Sydney Testers Meetup but was unable to present due to illness.
It is intended for testers who are Twitter newbies and Twitter virgins. My aim is to help get more testers online, tweeting, and contributing to the online global testing community.
I plan to present this talk at an Auckland Testers Meetup. In the meantime I’m asked about this topic almost weekly while I’m meeting new testers and spreading the word about CDT, so I’m making my unpolished slides available:
Test Tweeting slides – updated May 2014
I’ve had some great feedback already to add information about Lists, Apps and Live Tweeting at events.
Beyond that, if you have any feedback, or suggestions of your favourite lists and apps for Twitter, please comment below. Thanks!
Update: I presented this talk last night at #WeTest and it was a success (as defined and judged by me, arbitrarily).
Thanks everyone who provided feedback, and to everyone who attended last night and asked some excellent questions.
To those of you who haven’t signed up to Twitter yet – what are you waiting for? 🙂
Is it good enough yet? 
Dean Mackenzie
February 27, 2014 at 8:06 PM
Hi Kim,
You lost me when you mentioned Justin Bieber and Katy Perry… :-0
Your talk looks like a great primer for those testers unintiated to the ways of Twitter. Great to see someone covering this avenue of social media, as it’s such an accessible way for people (not just testers) to quickly broaden their horizons in a particular subject, or even generally.
You could mention tweeting at a conferences, which appears to be a big thing these days.
Oh, and thanks for including @WTANZ_ in the list of people to follow!
Dean
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Kim Engel
February 28, 2014 at 5:56 PM
Thanks Dean! Hopefully when I go to present this someone else will have more followers than Bieber..
Thanks for the tip on conferences, great idea. I was surprised to turn up a bit late at CITCON last week and see my tweets up on the big screens! My introduction to live tweeting, and it was a lot of fun as we tried to out-tweet each other.
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Kobi Halperin (@halperinko)
April 25, 2014 at 7:30 AM
Hey Kim,
Better late then never :-),
Actually – I do not agree Twitter is the best tool for the job of keeping updated on interesting stuff,
It is so hard to:
1. Track interesting posts amongst all that extra noise.
2. Track discussions – for that I trully prefer Hierarchical Forum where you can track threads and add interactions even weeks later.
3. Very hard to keep-up with real live discussion – such as during webinars.
Again – lots of duplicates due to retweets and people sharing same quotes.
It is a good way though to directly reach leaders in the community.
Cheers
Kobi
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Kim Engel
April 25, 2014 at 7:35 PM
Hi Kobi,
I’m presenting this in a few weeks so you’re not too late!
I agree with your 3 points, and I also think Twitter is the best tool because I don’t see a better alternative. There are more online testing magazines and forums available now, but I wouldn’t have known about most of them if not for Twitter.
1. Interesting posts vs. noise – Lists (tweets filtered to those from a subset of users) can help with this, if you have lists containing only those people who usually tweet something interesting. My Android app gives me notifications when more than a few people I follow all retweet the same thing. That’s a pretty good heuristic for an interesting tweet worth reading. Overall there are still massive amounts of noise. Unfollowing people can help.
2. Track discussions – Yes this is very annoying! Yet I don’t have conversations with the same range of people via email that I can with Twitter. Is there an alternative?
3. Live discussions – I find these fun when I’m present, and almost teasing me when I’m not there as I want to know so much more. Not enough context can be derived from short tweets. Regarding retweets, maybe we can find a better app (or request an update to an existing app) that can filter out retweets, and an option to just filter out retweets of people we are already following.
I see you’ve tweeted more than I have, so I’m probably not telling you anything new here! But if you’re looking for an alternative information source to keep you updated, I’d recommend the Software Testing Club website due to the high volume of active forum and blog participants, each with valuable insights.
Cheers,
Kim
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