Testing is serious business. Fun is not. Or is it?
We use games to teach testing, gamification to motivate work, playful exercises to build skills, and “fun” as a selling point for products. But fun is slippery. It is personal, contextual, fragile, and surprisingly easy to ruin by trying to measure it.
In this keynote, Kristjan will explore what fun means in testing. Can testing be fun? Should learning testing be fun? Does gamification actually help, or does it simply decorate boring work with badges and points? And when a product is meant to be enjoyable, how can testers investigate that without reducing the experience to a lifeless checklist?
Through painful personal examples, testing games, teaching experiences, and a dangerous amount of theory, Kristjan will break fun into smaller pieces: challenge, surprise, flow, social interaction, and quality-of-life features we often confuse with fun.
You will leave with an urge to analyze your own enjoyment - and may never look at your relaxing hobbies the same way again.
Key Takeaways:- How to think about fun as something observable, discussable, and testable.
- Why gamification, testing games, and playful learning can help - but can also fail badly.
- Why fun should be treated as a serious quality attribute, not a vague bonus.
