TL;DR
Last weekend on the 26th and 27th of September, we had Testival Zabok 2025. In this post you will find session topics that were created by the participants, and short report on the sessions that I attended.
How?
Testival is a testing conference highly influenced by CITCON. It is an unconference format, where on Friday participants propose and vote on session topics, and on Saturday we first have a keynote, and then we spread out across rooms to attend topics of our interest (keeping the rule of two feet in mind). There are two mingle sessions: Friday dinner and Saturday lunch, plus a party at the end of Friday. Plenty of time to connect with fellow testers.
Where?
This section is a little gem of a story about how I decided to be part of the organizing team. Zabok CUK Regenerator center was opened this year. It is an impressive hub for various types of events. And most importantly, it is public, owned by the City of Zabok, and funded mostly by EU funds. So I decided to bring Testival for the second time to Zabok. Very soon, CUK Regenerator was our Testival venue sponsor.
Sponsors
As Testival is a free conference, we need sponsors for food, drinks, and T-shirts. Our second sponsor was my good friend Nikola Glumac with his company, Thespian. Soon after, Njuskalo, Integracija od-do, and EPAM Systems joined, with great effort from Bojan Štimac and Tomislav Prša. Once the funding was secured, the rest was easy.
Session Setup
Participants were shy at first, but within an hour we had over 30 session submissions. My Test Design topic was one of them. I have to admit that I was very impressed with the topic selection, and none of them was about ISTQB!
| Time | Regenerator, Main Stage | Class room | Room with view on Zabok | Cinema |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10:15 – 11:00 | QA as Team Authority | Test Management Tools | “I cannot reproduce it” | Agencies vs In-house Positions in QA |
| 11:15 – 12:00 | How to Test Non Deterministic Systems | QA Estimates and Prioritization | Cutting corners in QA (Boeing failures) | How to Lead Meetings and Education |
| 12:15 – 14:15 | Lunch/Belot | Lunch/Belot | Lunch/Belot | Lunch/Belot |
| 14:15 – 15:00 | What is your biggest failure? | In Defense of QA Generalists | Vendors – in corporate world. | Test Design |
| 15:15 – 16:00 | I hate mobile apps! | How to resolve conflict? | AI Tools | Accessibility Testing |
| 16:15 – 17:00 | API security testing | Inhouse testing tool development | Searching for a Job (how to polish CV) | What is Good Documentation |
Keynote: Back to the Future
The keynote topic was my wish: I asked Irja if she could prepare a topic about real testing, a practice that is often put aside. And she rocked again! She successfully wove important software testing techniques into references from the Back to the Future movie. A pleasure to listen and learn.
QA as team authority
The setup of this session was about a real-world situation. A developer skipped a well-defined release process and deployed his ticket to live without consulting the QA team. This caused an issue on the live environment. We discussed what other teams do in this situation. Should the QA team have ultimate release process authority? What about bugs that are dismissed during triage? How to reduce the number of such bugs? As I did the BBST Bug Advocacy course both as a student and assistant teacher, I always share the bug advocacy punch line: “Testers should be able to sell their bugs to others.” This should be their question even before they create a ticket: Would I be able to sell this bug?
I can not reproduce it
I would say that this is the most common testing issue: “But it works on my computer.” Again, the BBST Bug Advocacy course puts a lot of focus on how to write reproducible bug reports.
Agencies vs In-house Positions in QA
For this session we had both sides involved: testers who work for agencies and agency owners. It was very interesting to see opinions from both sides. There was an opinion that when an agency “sells” tester hours at a better price, they should automatically raise testers’ salaries. As I am in the role of an agency owner, I do not agree with that opinion for several common-sense reasons. Salary is a contract between tester and agency. Testers are also paid during times when they do not work for agency clients—usually a great time for learning. Every tester could easily cut out the agency as a middleman by starting their own marketing and approaching clients directly on the free market.
Test Management Tools
This was the tester’s classic: what tools should we use? We mentioned tools across a wide spectrum, from Jira to TestLink. classic: what tools should we use? We mentioned tools across a wide spectrum, from Jira to TestLink.
Test Design
This was my session, in a small, fully equipped cinema with 25 cinema seats! What I did was open BBST Test Design presentation slides and start explaining the first lecture. What was interesting is that almost each sentence in those slides was a learning point. For example:
“Function is something that a program can do. Function could also be called: features, commands, capabilities.”
In just one line, we got material for a lively discussion that lasted for 45 minutes, without any official preparation from my side (except that I did Test Design as instructor and student some 7 years ago).
AI Tools
This session was led by Tomislav Prša and my MacBook :). Tomislav installed Warp, an agentic development environment, and used Google AI Studio. That was a hands-on presentation showing how to automate the Index.hr news portal using only prompts. After some back and forth, we did it. The price was burning up Tomislav’s tokens.
What is Good Documentation
This was the best session for me! How could it not be, because producing and keeping documentation up to date is one of the most crucial parts of the software development process. Some questions popped up during the discussion: what to document (API documentation vs end-to-end user scenarios), how to automate detection of stale documentation (yes, this really works in one company), and we mentioned the legendary Google practice of making testing documentation: Testing on the Toilets pamphlets.
Conclusion
I did not plan to get involve in Testival 2025 organization. But with today’s LLM tools, I put a lot of work into them, so organizing Testival 2025 and Testival 2019 was a big difference. So my dear ChatGPT thank you very much for helping me with the Testival 2025 organization.
