Hamilton Test Professionals Meetup

Our second meetup in Hamilton was an enjoyable event. Again, hosted by the great people at Pacifictech (Pacific Technology Solutions NZ) at their very cool venue overlooking the Waikato River. This time the team at Pacifictech also provided the speaker and topic – the journey of change from Waterfall to DevOps via Agile – and what that has meant for the testing people and processes within the organisation.

We all know that change is hard – hard for both the people who are impacted by the change as well as those designing and managing the change process. Richard presented a great case study on the Pacifictech successful experience using the three levels of People, Process, and Tooling. Richard talked about how these three levels provided the scaffolding for successful change – focus on the people, understand where the processes need to change, and then use the changed processes to influence the search, source, and selection of the tooling. Richard gave a good account of what the organisation had learned through the change, its current state, and where the organisation still needed to drive the change process. Richard’s presentation can be accessed here <Link to PDF>.

The impact on the testing team and testing processes was also presented, with a focus on how they introduced test automation into the testing ways of working. The choice of test automation – Robot Framework – prompted an active discussion on the various test automation technologies in use across Hamilton. This discussion has set us up for our next meetup in February 2024.

The topic list from our first meetup can be seen here <Link to PDF>. You can see the focus on test automation tooling and test processes was strong in our first meetup. Our third meetup is sure to bring about another insightful discussion. Luckily, planning for the third Hamilton meetup is already underway. With local organisations eager to talk about the automation technology that they are using, this will be an interesting session.

Thank you again Pacifictech for your support of the Hamilton Software Testing community.