Sanae Software Testing BEER.EX 2022 Impressions
We love being testers. But what do we love the most about the job?
Well, there are many things that attract us. Apart from the obvious ones such as creativity, constant challenges, puzzles, learning and changes, it’s very rewarding – the impact of your work can be seen almost every day. Another thing is the community of great and passionate people that you can learn from, and who help you move forward.
At the end of September we attended the Sanae Software Testing BEER.EX 2022, which was an event full of amazing speakers and presentations.
The conference was divided into two tracks => inspirational and technical, both of which brought quality information about the latest trends and technologies, not to mention lots of ideas worth thinking about.
The ones that resonated the most from the inspirational track were:
- How To Nudge Your Way Through Agile Testing by Ard Kramer,
- How You Will Survive the Digital Learning Darwinism with Agile Workplace Learning by Rudolf Groetz,
- Restart Your Career in IT by Veronika Pizano and Lenka Grigeľová, and
- Invest In Yourself by Nicola Lindgren.
How To Nudge Your Way Through Agile Testing
by Ard Kramer
As we all have our own biases, it’s up to us to use these biases in a positive way. Nudging is about giving people choices and altering their behavior in a predictable way. We liked how Ard showed six different effects nudging can have, and how to applying nudging in specific situations. The one that we could relate to the most was the “Zeigarnik effect”, which assumes that people tend to remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.
How You Will Survive the Digital Learning Darwinism with Agile Workplace Learning
Rudolf is an Agile Engineering Coach and a Learning Guide. He presented on the way to approach lRudolf is an Agile Engineering Coach and a Learning Guide. He talked about the way they approach learning and training within his company, and how they've found it to be the most effective way for both those he is training as well as the company.
Restart Your Career in IT
by Veronika Pizano and Lenka Grigeľová
At this open-table discussion, Veronika talked to Lenka about her career change from a lawyer to a tester. What made Lenka change her career path? How did she go about it? What did she have to give up, and what has it given her in return? Lenka is a great example for others who are thinking about a career change, whatever the reasons. It is never too late to make that first step 🙂
Invest in Yourself
Sometimes during your learning path you can experience some troubles and difficulties. Maybe the material you’re studying is too much, too boring or not matching your expectations. Due to these blocks and problems it can be easy to stop studying and consider just giving up your IT career. But don’t give up!
Nicola explained that the problem is not you, but the study material. Try to use different material and resources, try to change your training instructor, try to change the company – but never change your goals.
For people mainly focused on technical topics, the technical stage brought the most current theme – test automation.
We absolutely loved:
- The Automationists Gambit by Maaret Pyhäjärvi,
- Mobile Test Automation: The Robotic Testing Approach by Joona Sinisalo,
- Test Design Automation – The Future Has Arrived by István Forgács, and
- Autonomous Testing by Marcel Veselka.
The Automationists Gambit
A lot of testers usually start focusing on exploratory testing as they get close to the release date. However, that brings risks of bugs being detected on the last test environment before release to production that won’t then be fixed in time. Instead, we should start exploratory testing from the moment the first line of code is written. And JUnit tests especially should also be part of exploratory testing.
Mobile Test Automation: The Robotic Testing Approach
Low coding has become more and more popular in recent years. Many companies are aware of the complexity of writing code and test executions. For mobile test automation it is necessary to set up a local environment with various kinds of mobile devices and related data – and the way to eliminate the impact of this complexity can be via robotic approach.
Test Design Automation – The Future Has Arrived
The design of automation test cases is usually done using strict test-flow diagrams. However, sometimes these recommended flows are not enough for our test cases. There is a new technique called action-state testing, which covers more cases and should be used when testing single actions. Afterall, we’re not testing just one basic step – we need to think about more actions, and what could happen, and dive deeply into all steps from a user perspective. For more detail on this, see: Action-state testing
Autonomous Testing
An introduction on a new framework that enables an easy start to a test execution with one single line: The Tesena company has started to create a new framework to cover all test environments, plus the reporting related to each of them.
See you next time at SANAE.BEER.EX ;)
Denisa Hindosova & Mariana Kubikova