Manawatu QA Professionals Meetup Recap

Taking place on the 17th of November, the revamped Manawatu Quality Assurance Professionals Meetup showed both the strong size and maturity of the QA community in the region. The Quality Assurance Professionals Meetup is a non-sales, community-based event that aims to bring local Quality Assurance professionals together to share knowledge, experiences, and thoughts on QA topics relevant to the local community. The Manawatu event is just one among a series of events held across Tauranga, Taranaki, and Otago.

Being the first of the new format (and the first that many in the local community have attended), the focus of the event was both on networking and understanding current topics and themes relevant to the market. The meetup was facilitated using the Lean Coffee format which generated an impressive list of current topics that were divided into 6 thematic groups <link to Lean Coffee List PDF attached>.

Prior to the event, a survey was sent out that determined topics of interest as well as insights into work patterns for 2023. You can find the results here. The pre-meetup survey supported the focus on Test Automation. The discussion was wide-ranging, covering:

• the mix of tools in use: Selenium, Postman, ReadyAPI, Tosca, Cypress (paid and community editions), PlayWrite and Ghostwriter
• where automated testing and manual testing co-exist best
• where not to use test automation
• how to introduce manual testers into test automation (and is this a good idea?).

Compilation of Pictures from the Manawatu QA Professionals Meetup

Attendees were so engrossed by the conversation, that we ran over the allocated hour by 25 minutes. The discussions also extended well into the networking session after the formal part of the meetup. One observation made was that the meetup should be re-named the Quality Assurance Meetup to reflect the value of the testing community.

Key outcomes from the meetup were the opportunity to make site visits to see the different automation tools at work, a commitment to meet again in the February/March 2023, and a commitment to have a Test Managers meetup as a follow on to the Quality Assurance Professionals meetup.