Wellington Tosca Test Engineers Meetup

TTC was very stoked to work with the New Zealand Ministry of Education to deliver the first Tosca Test Engineers Meetup for 2023. Historically, the Wellington Tosca Test Engineers Meetup was the first meetup that TTC delivered to the community (closely followed by Tosca Test Engineers Meetup in Auckland and then the regional Test Professionals Meetups across Hamilton, Tauranga, Dunedin, Palmerston North and New Plymouth).

The meetup relationship with the Ministry of Education is a special one; they hosted the first post Covid meetup in the brief period of normality in 2021. The topic list has matured significantly since the early days of presentations, which covered topics like how to get started with Tricentis Tosca and upcoming features. In comparison, this most recent meetup on 29th March delved into some pretty technical topics.

Ministry of Education's Two-Way Integration with ADO

First up, the Ministry of Education presented on their custom development work to create a two-way integration with Microsoft Azure DevOps (ADO). ADO is the ‘single source of truth for the Ministry of Education'. It holds everything from business requirements that inform the test cases to managing the test delivery, aggregating the status of both automated and manual testing across all work programmes. This only works if there is consistency and accuracy of the information being stored in and presented from ADO.

To achieve this, the Ministry (with the technical support from TTC), has implemented a custom integrated environment that enables Tosca test cases to be created from their ADO implementation, enables test cases to be triggered from ADO, and stores the results back in ADO for integrated test execution reporting. Given the increasing use of ADO across New Zealand central government, this custom integration has been presented to other government agencies with one commenting after the presentation:

“What you have created, and iterated on is truly impressive. The value created by giving teams and leadership stakeholders a single source of truth that covers both automated and manual testing is something that I’m really keen to see more of, and really would like <our agency> to put effort into growing. I really do think you’ve come up with something quite remarkable. I’m going to have a debrief with the Test Capability leads here to let them know what the potential is.”

Tricentis Mobile Agent

Second up, Tricentis presented on Tricentis Mobile Agent, a centralised mobile service that manages local, remote, and cloud-based devices’ connectivity. Tricentis Mobile Agent enables test authoring and execution across Tricentis products including Tosca and Testim. It simplifies setup and configuration for iOS and Android connectivity, enabling a smoother mobile testing experience. For those that have worked with Tosca and mobile testing in the past, this was a revelation in ease of use and breadth of functional support. Additionally, by decoupling the Tricentis Mobile Agent from the core Tosca application, Tricentis is enabling themselves to rapidly support the release of new iOS and Android versions as well as the device hardware.

Combined, the two topics made for a very technical and eye-opening session and revealed the beneficial impact that they have on the business value of testing – single source of truth and the ease of what traditionally has been a complex exercise in terms of mobile device testing. A huge thanks to both the Ministry of Education and Tricentis for their role in putting on this community focused event.