Invercargill Test Professionals Meetup

Held at the premises of the local SBS Bank, the Invercargill Software Test Professionals met for the first time in a local community meetup. 14 attendees across 10 different organisations met to share experiences, work practices, techniques, stories and vision. Using the proven Lean Coffee format for opening meetup events like this, the format quickly got people talking and sharing stories about their own testing practices.

With a total of 12 votes, Test Tooling was the first topic. A mix of tooling is used across the community – custom built unit tests for one organisation through to ACCELQ-based UI level test automation with another. Jira was represented in the group for defect tracking and test case storage, as was Microsoft’s Azure DevOps favoured for pipeline management and tracking. One of the organisations represented had a strong vendor-package influenced testing approach with the test script and test tooling set by the vendors that supplied the software packages to their organisation. Interestingly, manual testing (using Excel for test scripts) was the dominant approach and tool across the organisations represented at the meetup.

Next off the topic wall was Testing Process (10 votes). When should testing begin was an interesting conversation, with responses ranging from when the code is delivered through to prior to the requirements being signed off. There was a good discission on testable requirements and the role of test professionals operating in a quality assurance role as opposed to software testing. Very much a cross over into the theme / topic of elevating the role of testing (part of the Testing as a Value theme). Developers testing their own code was quickly discussed and discounted, with the conversation moving into the risks of following a test script – staying inside the box. Lean Testing and recorded Exploratory Testing was covered in this context – the theory of never having to write a test script in order to do successful testing.

With time running out (the event started at 5pm and discussion had continued to 6:30pm – such was the strength of the conversation) the decision was made to meet again – targeting November 2023 as the timeframe for our next event. The measure of success of a good meetup is people staying on to continue the discussion – we had to hustle people out the door at 7:15pm, stopping active conversation to have that happen.

So – looking forward already to our next southernmost Test Professionals meetup in November 😊. The full list of Lean Coffee topics raised at the meet can be seen here: Invercargill Test Professionals Meetup Lean Coffee Topic List August 2023