Tauranga Test Professionals Meetup - March 2022

Under the March red-light settings, organising a face-to-face meetup was always going to require much collaboration from both organisers and attendees alike. With the strong sense of community within the Tauranga Test Professionals environment this was not only feasible – it helped create a good intimate environment for both the presentation and the following discussion.

At the previous Tauranga Test Professionals Meetup (linked here), topics for the next meetup were canvassed. A suggestion for an external (to the region) was made, together with the topic of managing test automation in the decentralised world of Agile where the trend has been to distribute tool decision making to individual squads/tribes. With many of the represented Tauranga business starting the journey both to Agile and the adoption of test automation, the question of how to manage tool selection and adoption (let alone training and the development of the associated test practices) in a practical and efficient enterprise manner was top of mind for many. There was a significant interest in learning from what other organisations have done – successful or otherwise.

Through their sponsorship of the Test Professionals Meetup in Tauranga, TTC offered Craig Moir to talk first-hand about his experiences in setting up a test automation team within a New Zealand Government agency and then leading and managing that team through the transition from Waterfall to Agile. Craig’s talk covered a range of topics, from original business case development through to decisions that were made for a mixed approach to tooling, the importance of strong release management and their journey of reducing release times from quarterly through to two weekly – and the consequential savings in test time and effort.

Craig’s presentation focused on the people side of the change – from establishing and running a core test automation team through the process of rotating team members in and out of Agile squads to ensure that in-sprint test automation was consistent with the end-to-end test automation that was a vital step in ensuring that collectively the applications were acceptable for release to the user community both internal and external to the Agency. Craig talked to both the planned approach entering into the transformation as well as the changes that needed to be made to react to the experiences in the field. It was a real first-hand account of an organisations journey through Agile and Test Automation. The Q&A that followed had the whole audience participating and was only stopped when the meetup had got to the allocated time of 7PM and we had to draw the session to a close.

The Tauranga Test Professionals Meetup is a community event that is open to anyone that has an interest in testing. It is a sales-free environment where people from the community can meet, present, share ideas and collaborate on initiatives. TTC is proud to be a sponsor of the meetup and we enjoy our regular interactions with the Tauranga Testing Community.