TTC New Zealand at NZ Testing Conference 2024

This year’s NZ Testing Conference, the first since 2022, was held at the Victoria University of Wellington on 27th June. TTC Global participated as a proud sponsor of the event with members of the TTC New Zealand team there to meet and engage with not only the local testing community, but also several attendees that had travelled from around the country.

The conference covered a diverse area of topics, such as “Creating a collaborative culture in the Testing word”, “Rethinking Quality in the Startup World”, “Stop Automating, Start Investigating”, “Finding the Fun: Researching and Playtesting Games”, “ETL: The Testing Niche you’ve never thought of” and “Diary of a Reluctant Recruiter: Your value as a tester”, with breakout sessions in between presentations to enable attendees to talk directly with the presenters and ask questions in a less formal format.

A presentation I found particularly engaging (that's also quite relevant to TTC Global’s service offering) was Toby Martin’s presentation “Stop Automating, Start Investigating”. Toby is the QA Practice Lead at Pushpay, a donations management firm. His presentation suggested that firms shouldn’t rush out to automate as much as possible in an attempt to improve quality; there is still a role for people to perform experience based exploratory testing.

The lived experience that we bring as people can‘t be replaced by automated ‘checking’. You still need testing experience to understand where the value in automation lies and where it should be deployed appropriately. In summation, there is certainly a role for test automation, but it is not a silver bullet that will guarantee quality. This view is aligned with TTC’s own approach – automate only where it demonstrably adds value, testing (including manual testing) is a profession and has a skillset, and the two are needed to be combined to ensure a realistic approach to software quality assurance.

The day wrapped up with a panel featuring 3 senior industry professionals discussing career planning and progression for QAs in the NZ Tech sector.

TTC Team at the 2024 NZ Testing Conf

Overall the NZ Testing Conference was a great opportunity for our team to network, catchup up with some familiar industry faces, and also connect with new people. It was an excellent opportunity to share TTC’s experience and service offerings including Automation Implementation and Quality Management reviews. As always, the TTC branded merch was popular with the conference goers. Thanks to the NZ Testing Conf team for organising this event!