Conferences are well-known places for making networking and acquiring new knowledge. Since AgileWorks supports the development of its employees, I was given the opportunity to attend the software testing and quality assurance conference TestCon Europe 2019, which took place in mid-October in Vilnius.
The conference started with a joint seminar on quality transformation, discussing how the definition of quality has changed over time and will likely continue to change in the future. After that, various seminars continued simultaneously in four halls.
I was sure that upon returning from the conference, the developers would ask if there was anything of interest to them, so I first chose a seminar called "Strategic TDD." Indeed, the seminar was more geared towards developers, but it also discussed in general terms how to decide which tests need to be written. From this seminar, I took away the idea that "testing should start from the point where the most information can be gathered."
For the next seminar, there were several topics that would have likely been very useful, such as how to write the best load tests or how to test more sustainably in today's DevOps world. Undoubtedly, all interesting topics, but my choice was "Candy Crush QA AI Saga."
I must admit, I chose well! It was one of my favorite seminars throughout the conference. One of the leading testers of Candy Crush shared his experiences on how they trained an artificial intelligence to play their games and raise alerts for any detected issues. Although the AI did not focus on functionality, it has reportedly made missing textures or translations a problem of the past.
Before lunch, there was also a talk on bug reporting, reminding us of the good old basics—reports should be short and precise, with images and reproduction steps added if necessary.
After a refreshing lunch break, the only Estonian at the conference, Martin Tiitmaa, gave a presentation titled "My Journey to Accessibility Testing and What I Learned from It." The speaker discussed usability testing and how to ensure that your application is usable by everyone. An interesting point Martin made was that one should not only consider users with visual impairments but also those who, for one reason or another, use the application with only one hand.
The day concluded with a talk about how if users cannot use the system, the system does not work. The discussion was about user experience testing and how what seems to be the most user-friendly solution for the developer might not be understandable to the users at all.
Like the first day, the second day also began with a joint seminar discussing definitions. This time, instead of quality, the topic was agility—what it means and how to be agile. I was very pleased with the topic choice since our company also follows agile principles. Like with quality, it was hard to define it precisely, but short cycles and learning from mistakes were the keywords that came up most frequently.
For me, the seminar day continued with a focus on security testing. Unfortunately, it must be noted that this time there was not much talk about testing itself. Rather, examples were shown of how people have left various database or administrator passwords visible to the world in their open-source projects.
In anticipation of lunch, I chose a seminar on ethics on the second day. They talked about #dieselgate (just to clarify, the Volkswagen scandal where better emissions results were shown than actually existed) and how not a single developer or tester raised their voice on the issue, even though they knew what they were doing was illegal.
After lunch, another one of my favorites—a seminar on "Chaos Monkey," which discussed how to test the behavior of the system when different parts of it stop working (for example, when the database no longer runs in the background). The topic was interesting, but unfortunately not very applicable in everyday work.
The second day concluded with another joint seminar, but this one differed from the others in that the main topic was not testing or even software related, but rather psychology. Examples were given of how rephrasing questions can lead to very simple solutions to even complex problems, and how putting yourself in another role can change the answers to those same questions. An interesting perspective and definitely worth trying out!
In retrospect, it was a very cool event. I gained new knowledge and refreshed my understanding of the basics of software testing. As is customary in our office, upon returning to work, I gave the developers a thorough overview of the conference, and we collectively discussed what I learned in the seminars. Most importantly—I attended my first-ever conference, met new testers from Estonia and abroad, and thoroughly enjoyed it all!
Many thanks to AgileWorks for this opportunity, looking forward to going again next year!