My friend
Zach Spencer wrote this last night on twitter:
I am always amused at how @ prefers lightning talks over long workshops
I hadn't ever used that expression, but the gentleman has a point -- I do lightning talks. A lot.
Now I wouldn't go so far as to say that lightning talks are "my thing", but they certainly are "one of my things." I've introduced lightning talks at user's groups, conferences, and all sorts of other events.
If you'll allow me, I'd like to explain why.
Lightning Talks Vs. Tutorials
There is an old maxim that corporate test training is "good enough" if the attendees get one useful test tip per day. One. I'm actually serious; people I respect have listed that as a reasonable goal for commercial training --
check out slide number four, bottom left.
Now there are a lot of other hidden benefits to training; it can provide a safe environment for the team to discuss things. You can pull in other disciplines, and the developers and analysts can learn about testing. It can provide an opportunity for the team to
gel.
The thing is, a typical training day is
six hours. Is one idea per six hours of training really the high bar we should be shooting for?
Compare that to a one-hour lightning talks session. Ten five-minute talks in single slot; ten test ideas.
Say five of them don't apply to you -- the folks on-stage are talking about problems you don't have. Of the five that are left, perhaps you miss two; you just aren't paying attention. Two more "wouldn't work here" or the boss won't let you try them for one reason or another.
That still leaves one idea per hour that might actually make a difference.
Now compare that to the yardstick I gave above for commercial training.
Can you see why I'm geeked about lightning talks?
Lightning Talks as a start to a speaking career
Remember when we were children and learned to swim? We didn't start in the deep end of the pool. We dipped our feet in and tried things gradually. Speaking is similar, but there really is no shallow end of the pool. In most cases, the first thing to do is create a one-hour talk.
When someone has never done public speaking before and has to give a one-hour talk, you typically get something like this:
Opening joke - 5 minutes
Agenda slide - tell 'em what you'll tell 'em - 5 minutes
Read a definition, like "quality assurance" or "software testing" - 5 minutes
"Body" - 15 minutes
"Conclusion" - 5 minutes
"Q&A" - 15 minutes
Notice we've manage to pack fifteen minutes of actual content into a fifty-minute slot.
No, wait ...
Seriously, if you have to give a one hour talk out of the gate, it's likely that you will be sweatin' bullets. New speakers are likely to create a big powerpoint and read the slides, which means paying $400 for airfare and $400 for hotel and $2,000 for conference fee and ... you get just about the same value as you could have downloading the slides on the web and reading them.
Yes, of course, we can (and should!) demand more value for our conference dollar, but this is also a disservice to the speaker, because that speaker is now going to view the experience as a success.
In ten years, you'll be seeing the same dude, using the same slides with the same technique, only he'll be giving a keynote or day-long tutorial.
... That's not what I want, either.
Lightning Talks force you to make a single point, make it well, and get off-stage
With a lightning talk, there is no room for the opening joke, the big agenda slide, the "tell 'em three times" approach. Lightning talks require the speaker to boil down his argument into one point, say it well, and get off the stage. We generally try to eliminate powerpoint, forcing the speakers to actually
talk like a human using a whiteboard or markers. At the same time, the speaker is going to spend the rest of the hour watching the other presenters, and the timeframe will be so compressed that they can compare speaking styles and adjust their style consciously.
After a couple of years of giving lightning talks, I found that my one-hour presentations became a collection of ten lightning talks, with each "slide" being one talk. I do put lecture notes in the notes section of the powerpoint (some people want that text), but the slides are pretty much a single picture with a word to a single sentence.
What I am trying to do is turn my hour talks turns into ten test ideas. Now compare that to an hour talk which might be
one test idea, plus some Q&A ... which would you rather have?
Lightning Talks as an alternative format
Maybe you don't have an hours worth of things to say. Or maybe you do have an hours worth of ideas, but you'd also like to rant about something that ticks you off. Maybe you have metaphor you'd like to explore that couldn't be a serious one-hour talk, like "
What I can learn about Agile from Pirates" or "
Herding Cats" - or something else. Lightning talks create a format where you can play with ideas.
At mutli-day conferences, you can do lightning talks later in the week, forming the ideas during the week. This means people can respond to a keynote or talk with their own ideas, moving the bar upward on the discussion. That's
good.
Disclaimer: Most of these arguments are not unique to software testing; I've read many of them before from
Mark Jason Dominus, and have his formal written permission to re-use the lightning talk term, format, and language.
One more technique in a mixed bag
Lightning talks aren't the only format I am excited about. At STPCon Fall 2011 I did a one-hour hands-on tutorial on "Quick Attacks" with no powerpoint at all, that combined a brief (five-minute-ish) lecture with three distinct hand-on exercises. I may propose a workshop for STPCon Fall 2011 that is an all-day series of these lecture/exercises.
I'm just saying that five minutes forces us to actually say something of meaning -- or risk be revealed for having nothing to say. It separates the wheat from the chaff. It fosters a sense of community (I didn't even get to that), it's a good recruiting tool for future speakers, and it has a mutual sharpening effect.
We've got plenty of long workshops in our field, so yes, I guess I am a champion for a sort of counter-balance format.
I hope that by now you can see why.
If not, please consider coming to a conference with me sometime soon. I'd be happy to show you. :-)