Christchurch Test Professionals Meetup

We saw a fantastic turnout for our first ever Test Professionals Meetup in Christchurch – arguably the ‘capital’ of New Zealand’s South Island. With 36 registrations across 20 organisations, we planned to house a diverse crowd of test professionals. Ultimately, we had 27 guests attend what was an open forum Lean Coffee discussion on what are the current themes across Christchurch – with some interesting results and discussions. The emergence of the potential impact of AI on testing was a clear theme in the meet, closely followed by Testing Process and Test Automation. The full topic list is available here <Link to Lean Coffee Topics PDF> together with the associated votes.

Based on the evening's grouping, Test Automation was the first topic off the wall and onto the discussion table. There was a clear consensus that 100% automation is never the goal – and the percentages of manual and automation testing would definitely depend on the application under test, the stability of the regression suite, and the level of application change. When to automate was also covered as well as the role of automation. Test automation's role, the group discussed, was checking and verification while the manual tester should remain the true source of actual testing. The range of testing tools across those in the room was vast and included both open-source and commercial products such as Cypress, Playwright, Selenium, Tricentis Tosca, JMeter (performance), Python, PyTest, Postman. The use of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tooling was also mentioned, with at least one organisation working with UIPath as a test automation tool.

Guests at the Christchurch Test Professionals Meetup

With the increasing use of artificial intelligence in test automation tooling, the conversation naturally extended into AI. Across the team, there was strong evidence of AI being used to create test scripts from developers' wireframe work (VisionAI in Tricentis Tosca). ChatGPT has also helped testers with Test Strategy, Test Planning documentation, and test automation coding. The use of AI by Business Analysts to document acceptance criteria generated a bit of discussion. Concern around the quality of the acceptance criteria was a key issue.

Closing out the meetup was an animated discussion on the value of ISTQB in tester education and certification. Always a polarising topic, it generated a bit of good natured banter. The general consensus was, well, sometimes it serves as an entry point, but nothing replaces real world experience!!

We closed out nicely at 6:45pm, and as always, it was a lovely experience. Keep an eye out for our next meetup, which is already booked for 21st November 2023 😊.