Inaugural Tosca Test Engineers Wellington Meet-up Wrap-up

Thanks again to those who managed to make it on the night. Looks like we got the food just right, had a bit of liquid refreshments to spare and managed to keep all of the presentations to time. A big thanks to Ministry of Social Development for providing the venue and a nod of thanks to The Testing Consultancy for sponsoring the event food and refreshments.

We were privileged to have four speakers at our first event. There were some good key messages from each speaker that I have summarized below:

• Vinny and Maithra's talk on learning Tosca and working through the Tosca Certification process was of interest to both new users and the more experienced Tosca users that had not yet gone through the certification process. Maithra talked about the Tosca online learning being an emphasis on real world learning. When she did the online training and certification she was surprised how AS1 was more than just theory. And further surprised that AS2 took the student through the modern day test world and experience in scrum / agile based environments. AS2 was even more practical that AS1, covering re-use of test assets as well as practical test case creation. An online e-commerce environment was the application under test for the course – it was far more than just theory. Overall, Maithra set an expectation of a week for AS1 and four days for AS2 and she completed her Tosca certification in this time. Vinny focused on the nervousness that she had in undertaking the Tosca learning and certification, how the ‘Tosca in a Heartbeat’ videos were invaluable for her learning and how useful the Tosca Community were to her.
  
• Something I hadn’t realized until I saw Grant Wilson’s presentation on exploratory testing was the range of use cases for this function. Creating auditable test scripts and results was a given, as was being able to repeat the exact same script that generated an issue. Using the recorded test scripts to assess feasibility of test automation, making the scripts and the resulting playback available as a training tool (printed or online) as well as using the exploratory testing recording to record actual customer usage of the application so that UI/UX testing could be included in the test exit report were new ones for me. That the exploratory testing tool didn’t need a local Tosca install was of interest – people can trigger the exploratory test recorder from an emailed link – and still the test script and record as stored in the Tosca repository.
  
• Closing out the session Doug Mauafua walked through the functional enhancements in Tosca from Version 11 through to Version 12, complete with videos of example functionality. The level of platform support for the likes of SAP was huge, as was the ability to better manage test data (including obfuscation, synthetic data and a visual representation of dynamic expressions where used.

All that and we still managed to finish on time.

Perhaps the most pleasing aspect of the evening was the level of networking in the room. People took the time to introduce themselves, meet, talk and make plans to talk again both before and after the session, with us having to actively nudge people out the door so we could close out the event.

So…a good first event. Next steps are to schedule a September meet-up, gather some topics and speakers around a given theme, and set up a Slack channel or similar for people to keep in contact between times.

To be part of the community and register for future events sign up here for Wellington and here for Auckland. We are looking at creating a Palmerston North chapter for Test Engineering in general (not just Tosca). You can register for that here.

Spread the word. This isn’t just for experienced Tosca Engineers. Anyone who is keen to look at Tosca is welcome.

Thanks again to those that attended the inaugural Tosca Test Engineers Wellington Meetup.