Tauranga Test Professionals Community Gets Together Again

Following the previous two face-to-face Tauranga Test Professionals Meetups and the virtual meet held during the Covid-19 lockdown, the Test Professional Community met again on Tuesday 20th April 2021. Hosted by Bay of Plenty Regional Council, it was a gathering of both familiar and new faces across several of the major employers within the Bay of Plenty geography.

As a city Tauranga has a number of good things going for it. A great climate, the reputation for one of the fastest growing cities in New Zealand and a close knit testing community that network well. Including TTC, six major employers were represented at the event, as well as some independent testing professionals. Outputs from previous Tauranga Test Professionals meetups were tabled as a record of what the group had discussed previously, together with that of the recent Taranaki Test Professionals meetup as a regional comparison of test topic focus. One of the areas of interest was how the testing community in Tauranga had changed over the 18 months that the group had been meeting, and how the current state compared to the likes of New Plymouth.

Using the proven Lean Coffee format adapted to suit the needs of the meetup, the resulting topic list was clear in that Test Automation had become a community focus. This topic dominated the group discussion which went on for more than the allocated time such was the level of interest. The value and type of qualifications for testers also scored highly in the resulting topic list, as did questions on the future format of the Test Professionals meetup – how to increase the value to the local testing community. The sense was that across the Tauranga testing community there was a broad level of interest across similar topics with topic voting being centred on these three main topic areas. Unfortunately, the imposed time limit constrained discussion to just the theme of Test Automation – and even then the discussion continued right through into the post-event networking time.

As with the previous meetups, with catering being supplied by TTC, one of the main areas of value in the Test Professional Meetup is the local community getting to know ‘who is who in the local zoo’. In the networking time after the formal part of the meetup, there was conversation around local site visits for ‘show and tell’ sessions and a commitment was made to re-establish the local community Slack channel to get the community networking again. There was agreement across the room that a lot could be learned by seeing and comparing each organisation’s test practices and structure – and decisions that had been made on tooling and approaches with testing that had been implemented.

For the next event loosely scheduled for three months’ time, a mini ‘Ted Talk’ format with lightening 3 slide presentations of no more than 5 minutes each was suggested and generally agreed across the group. That will be the focus for the next meetup to be held around the July / August 2021 timeframe.

For further information and any questions on the Tauranga Test Professionals meetup, please contact TTC.