Australian Testing Days – Sydney Conference Overview

I had a blast at Australian Testing Days Conference in Sydney on Friday. It’s always good to get reconnected with some colleagues and to make new connections. First up we had Jennie Naylor go over how to use OKR’s to drive the Quality Onwership:

Using OKR's to grow quality ownership - sketchnotes

The OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework has been in use since the 70’s and is used by companies such as Google, Uber and Facebook to set their organisational goals. OKR is a framework that can be used at any level within your organisation. This presentation mention how to use OKRs to help improve quality and ownership in a team.

Key Takeaways

The key takeways I got from this talk was how to use OKRs to determine if experiments are successful or not and getting the whole team involved in quality and product ownership.

AI and the impact on QA

Given by Chhavi Raj Dosaj who proposed the question, can AI can the landscape of testing?  Chhavi had a big topic to fill. I think his main point was a little lost because he spent too much time going over the basics and he wasn’t able provide compelling examples of where AI could benefit the QA process.

One of his examples was using an unsupervised learning algorithm to select the top manual test cases to execute in the next testing cycle based on past performance of said test cases. Anyone who primarily uses test cases to manage their testing work and reporting is using a pretty dated testing practice that doesn’t scale or make sense in the Agile world. You can read more about my thoughts on the end of manual testing. I also wish he asked me for feedback on his slide design before he got up on stage. There were some presentation sins committed in his slide deck.

dev Ops Testing Strategy

DevOps Testing strategy by Amit Kulkarni fell victim to the old bait and switch presentation sin. The title didn’t match up to the content. My key take away from this talk was, “there are tons of tools out there you can use in a continuous testing way”. There wasn’t any DevOps in this talk at all. 

Performance Testing in CI

Andrey Pokhilko gave an engaging talk on Performance Testing in CI using opensource tools. I learnt the name of a new tool; Taurus. Which can be used on top of JMetre and is a little easier to use than the good old JMetre.

State of BDD

As I’ve already done Gojko Adzic’s spec by example workshop offered through YOW! a few years ago, I already had a decent idea where this talk would go. Bria Grangard was engaging and gave a good update on the state of this field.

Transforming Testing

Bruce McLeod gave an engaging talk in business strategy and how it will transform testing. This was one of my highlights of the conference. Bruce goes over how testing needs to change from a culture of “protection” to a culture of experimentation using the Netflix chaos monkey as an example. 

1 comment

Leave a Reply