Writing time: 1.5 hour
TL;DR
This is my learning experience of Testival#36 meetup held at Degordian premises. I hope that this post will encourage other software testers to attend Testival #37 meetup and enhance their learning path.
Sponsor of this meetup was Degordian (https://www.degordian.com/). They are an independent digital production & marketing agency. They create award-winning websites and mobile applications for clients all around the globe. Degordian was founded in 2009 and in 8 years has grown into a team of more than 120 professionals with outstanding skills and experience. Thanks!
We had 18 participants and we started with usual introductions. Every participant should introduce themself, which is great opportunity to break the ice for first timers.
Zeljko introduce the Testival meetup and following Testival conference. Every speaker of “regular” talk is entitled for free WebCamp 2018 ticket and Moleskine notebook sponsored by my company, Tentamen. He informed us that beer tap was not working at that time 🙁
At the beginning we had a small #jobfair where attendants can announce that they seek/offer jobs. Repsly and Oradian are hiring, so if you are interested, check their sites.
Then we moved on main talk:
#1 Davor Banović: Acceptance test driven development. Is it a myth?
This talk covered the basic concepts of Acceptance test driven development, it’s benefits and pitfalls. The talk is also a short introduction to RobotFramework. It included some real stories and examples.
Davor has a dozen years of experience in software testing, test automation, customer support and team leading. He is founder and one of organisers of the Testival conference. In his private time Davor writes and philosophise. His latest book you can find at http://brokenumbrella.eu/. Davor is QA Team Lead at Oradian.
Davor supported his talk with appropriate quotes which should trigger some test ideas.
"James S. Corey: Begin with end in mind"
Which I translated frame your testing (M. Bolton excellent article on the topic) session and Davor’s simpler explanation “Every test should have an end”.
"A Schopenhauer: ... over the hill top, you will pick up your speed"
My takeaway – there is learning curve for every project, and point in time of that learning when this process will speed up!
He introduced and provided an example for Robot Framework. Test scenarios were written in Gherkin format. They should only capture application behaviour, not the implementation details (click here, input there, for web application example, is bad). Example for housekeeping robot: Please open the door. Because door implementation could change (knob on right or left side of the door).
Our work is presentation of our capabilities.
Good words worth much but cost little.
Nothing to add here 🙂
In the end Davor shared his experience with Apple store 7 years ago. No api, so he used Watir in order to automated submission of 100+ application updates.
Davor mentioned that Chinese use one hand to show 1-10 numbers. And triggered Lighting talk #3 by Zeljko.
Ana Prpic finally got her Moleskine on this meetup, and she found an issue, her Moleskine had two intro pages, additional one in the middle of the notebook.
Biggest takeaway::And I noticed something very important, a number of participants were taking notes of this meetup!
As Zeljko knows something about beer taps, he identified the issue, co2 tank was empty. We got another one, but still no beer 🙁
After break over pizza and caned beers, we moved on to Lighting talks.
#1 Lighting talk by me, Tentamen: What I learned on European Testing Conference 2018.
You can read about that here and here.
#2 Marko Kruljac, Degordian: Practice your testing skills by playing board games
Marko used whiteboard. What connects playing board games and testing:
- fun
- social activity
- reduce of stress. When you are stressed during your testing session, this usually indicates wrong approach or not testable application. Proper testing is always fun.
- creative work
- mental practice
He explained rules for Alchemist board game.
Here is what I picked up:
- 8 alchemical
- that consists of 3 atoms
- atoms could be + or –
- and could be red, green or blue.
- you mix atoms, and try to find alchemical recipe in limited number of tries
- you use mobile app to test your mixing ingredients, aka recipe
You need to discover the alchemical recipe.
#3 Zeljko Filipin from Wikimedia: Chinese hand gestures for numbers 1-10
Zeljko fixed beer tap! The problem was at the beginning of tube that connects co2 tank. That part was cut off, and beer started to flow!
