NZ Testing Conference 2022
It’s been a long time since we did some learning Face-to-Face!
By Aroha Merrilees, Ruby Yeh, & Vivian Yang
Representatives of the First AML QA team attended the inaugural NZ Testing Conference in Wellington, on 1 July 2022. This was the first in-person testing conference the team has attended since coronavirus reached our shores. It was fantastic to do some team bonding, hear from great speakers, mingle with like-minded people, and do some networking too.
This is a summary of some of our favourite talks, and the things we learnt along the way!
Cooking up a great tester - James Espie
This was a fun talk that compared testing with cooking. You need all the ingredients & a recipe to make everything come together well, as “ingredients by themselves are meaningless”. James had an example where he had a spoon full of sour cream, yummy with nachos but not so nice on it’s own.
James suggested a successful tester needs to have a good work environment that encourages them to learn. At First AML, we have a training budget to ensure all our engineers have the opportunity to develop their learning. Like James mentioned, we also encourage early testing, and plenty of pair testing too.
This quote from James - “Seek out an organisation’s bugs and consider business value” - helps to define our QA responsibilities. We should be going beyond ensuring the product is just functional, and also consider the perspective of the end user and value it brings to their business.
It’s really nice to hear others have similar thoughts to how we work at First AML too.
The incredible simplicity of automation in 2022 - Olga Baranovskaya
This was an interesting talk. Olga talked about how she investigated a few automation frameworks to find the best one to suit her needs and the needs of the business. There are “lots” of automation frameworks that can be used. And more when you look at a whole pile of the logos on her presentation.
Olga narrowed her selection down to Cypress. Which is also what we use for our End-to-End testing when we deploy to production. From a learning point of view, Cypress is relatively easy to learn. You can create test scripts quickly, easy to mock data, great for visual and accessibility testing. This was great to hear as accessibility is high on our list, as we have a wide range of end users that use our product.
It was great to hear the about the ease of use, and gave us more confidence to also get involved in writing more Cypress tests!
Let’s play with a screen reader! - Prae Songprasit
With more and more accessibility changes we are making to our platform, with regulations in place in the States and EU for website accessibility, does that mean we should comply with the WCAG standards? This talk has definitely got us thinking of how we can make our platform more keyboard friendly and accessible to all.
Prae mentioned screen readers are not just for the blind. Screen readers are a benefit for a range of different users, with different needs, that some of us might not work with in our day to day lives.
Screen readers can be overwhelming at first, as we have to take into consideration what to test and what to look out for when everyone’s needs are different. Prae did a live demo, which must be scary with a room of 200+ staring at you, with a screen reader to show us the importance of knowing how to start and stop a screen reader, make sure elements are named including images and pictures on the page. With proper naming of html elements, it could also aid navigation when a user is pairing the screen reader with the keyboard.
Other take-aways
”We should focus on the journey of a change on its way to production, over getting the change into production” Camy Bhandari. This helps me in gathering ideas for improving the testing process, as local is a mock environment, we should do more testing on different per-production environment and try to catch the errors on different environment to see what has been broken and why.
Jasmin Mayfield talked about “Test the thing right, or Test the right thing”. She suggests more time spent on the customer’s needs, and user research, helps to create designs & requirements that are truly relevant and with a high level of usability. This will save time during the development cycle, and reduces avoidable rework time. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that QA often gets involved in these early phases. At First AML we encourage our QA’s to get involved early, including the design & requirements stages, to give feedback, assess risks, and build knowledge of features to come.
So how was it …
Reflecting on our experience:
It was a great venue to build company brand awareness by wearing our F-AML tees.
The panel discussion talked about the value and impact of a conference. A conference helps to open minds, provide opportunities for networking, inspiring people, and great for the testing community as a whole!
Networking was high on our list, especially when you are in a room with like-minded people, industry leaders, and influencers in our space.
We got exposed to different technologies, techniques, and processes. We can compare if we are on the same track, similar track, or a completely different track.
We also got fresh ideas on what to continue learning about.
It was a full on day with 7 speakers, a panel discussion, 2 lightening talks, more talks from the sponsors, and loads of good yummy food. All rounded off with a fun quiz on all that had been presented, with a few give-aways. Needless to say we needed to pay more attention or get faster at answering the questions, as we didn’t win a prize. But winning all the same, as we came to learn and learn we did!