Overviews of Test Practices and Journeys Prove Popular in Tauranga

Held at the Trustpower Tauranga offices, the meetup attracted people from a range of organisations in the Tauranga area and from a wide variety of test team sizes. A straw poll conducted at the meetup showed that we had people from single person test teams to those with 10 or more, those that had adopted more agile ways of working and those that were yet to, and those that had implemented a test automation environment together with those that were considering how best to approach the implementation of test automation.
Sponsored by TTC with their provision of food and drinks it was another great event – ending at about 6:45pm on the night.

While the focus of the Tauranga Test Meetup is on the community, there are speakers and presentations at each event. For this one we were lucky enough to have two very good speakers – both from the local testing community.

From the host ,Trustpower, Linda presented on their journey from waterfall style project approaches to more modern ways of working, complete with squads and chapters. Linda talked through the catalysts for change and how the change itself was organically implemented into Trustpower. She covered the benefits that the Trustpower test team were seeing – a greater level of involvement in the development process – and the need for chapters across the squads to focus in on the test practices that each squad were doing. The presentation triggered a discussion across the meetup on the introduction of modern ways of working like DevOps and Agile into organisations and the impact of other organisational change activities like hot desking and remote working. That one presentation alone generated enough discussion to almost fill the event.

Our second presentation was from the Bay of Plenty Regional Council. Garry presented on their journey towards test automation – the reasons for starting the change and the process (and timeline) of delivery. Garry emphasised the focus on an agreed priority of need and to not get distracted by the shiny stuff – it is the shiny stuff that cause project blowouts. Garry talked to a couple of simple metrics used to calculate the value (return) of test automation investment to the business, and his desire to have test cases used as early as the procurement process so that organisations are procuring on outcomes over requirements. Garry’s presentation was followed by a good discussion on test automation and sprint planning – when and when not to automate and the value of recorded exploratory testing for ‘in sprint’ development testing.

With the end of the year rapidly approaching this is our last Tauranga Test Meetup for 2019. Planning is underway for another in late February 2020 / early March 2020 with two candidate topics and presenters already identified. To keep up with upcoming events, follow TTC on Linkedin or visit https://ttcglobal.com/what-we-think/events.

On behalf of TTC and The Tauranga Test Community - all the best for the Christmas and New Year holiday break. We look forward to meeting again in 2020.