Manawatu Software Quality Assurance Test Professionals Meetup

So. How diverse can the toolchains across a relatively small and tight community be? Well, as it happens, quite diverse. And yet, there's quite a lot of common ground.

Our Manawatu Software Quality Assurance Professionals meetup for July was again hosted by the great team at FMG. Held on Tuesday 16th July 2024, our format was Ted Talk style – 5 quick presentations from the major test practices across the community on their testing toolchain. From Requirements Management to Defect Management and Release Management. We also discussed Test Automation, Test Case Repository, Documentation Repository, and Test Management environment in between.

And it was awesome!!!

We had great representation from the community – all the major players. Massey University, Toyota New Zealand, Tourism Holdings Limited , FMG (of course), and Enable New Zealand. Proving that one size does not fit all, we had presentations from teams of 0.5 FTS’s through to teams of 20 FTE’s (and still hiring). The diversity was significant for a small community – yet accurately reflected the digital innovation that the Manawatu region is known for.

What did we learn:

• Commercial off the shelf tools still have a place. There was common usage of tooling from Tricentis as an example, Atlassian (Jira and Confluence) and Microsoft (Azure DevOps).
• Equally, Open-Source technologies are well used. While Selenium historically has a place, the new moving technology is Playwright – and some organisations are eagerly awaiting the Playwright / Microsoft platform.
• A variety of Test Management tools – from qTest to TestRail and XRay.

Other gems from the session were:

• Accessibility Testing. Manawatu has their own Centre of Excellence with Accessibility Testing - within Enable New Zealand – where ensuring that they meet the digital needs of their customer base is very high on their priority list.
• Documentation and auditable test results is key – many of the presenters referenced this as a steel thread through their test practices.
• The local testing community is truly very collaborative. There were LOTS of good questions and conversations through the evening.

The consolidated content from the event is available here: <Link to attached PDF>. How do these toolchains compare to your environment?