4.6Brown Bag Sessions and Internal Workshops

Brown Bag Sessions (30-45 Minutes)

Informal sessions where team members share knowledge over lunch.

Effective formats:

• Tool demos: "Here is how I use X to do Y"
• Bug post-mortems: "Here is an interesting bug I found and how I tracked it down"
• Domain deep-dives: "Here is how the invoicing system actually works"
• External learning: "I attended a conference / read an article / took a course. Here is what I learned."

Scheduling: Bi-weekly or monthly. Rotate presenters. Make attendance optional but make the content valuable enough that people want to come.

Internal Workshops (2-4 Hours)

More structured, hands-on sessions for skill development.

Example workshop: "Exploratory Testing Masterclass"

1. Introduction: what is exploratory testing, when to use it (15 min)
2. Demo: senior QA demonstrates a charter-based session (20 min)
3. Hands-on: participants explore a feature in pairs using charters (60 min)
4. Debrief: each pair shares their findings and approach (30 min)
5. Reflection: what techniques worked, what to apply going forward (15 min)