Toronto Testing Meetup - March Edition - Recap

7 Months - 4 meetups. Toronto Testing Meetup has come a long way from where it first started.

Surely this has been one of the biggest ?meetups we’ve had. We are overwhelmed with the interest and the feedback we have?received from the attendees.?

We thank Sri Gantakolla for being such an amazing host and for kicking off the event with me. Ari Rowland , 埃森哲 Canada Testing Head as well as our gracious host welcomed everyone to the event. We can’t thank enough to the speakers who made this event such an engaging event ?for the community.

Let’s recap some of the powerful?messages we heard from the speakers which can be game changing in ?the world of testing .

Sharmila Sivasankaran has always been an impromptu speaker, who can grab the attention of the audience through her great speeches. ?She is surely one the of most engaging and knowledgeable speakers we have in the Toronto Testing community. Speaking on the topic of “How to build diverse high functioning Teams”, she related to her journey as a leader and how she built an amazing diverse team in her organization from the grounds up. Talking about her own path to becoming the VP of QA at Klick, she shared the key guidance to the?community that if you want something, you must go and get it. It is so important for us as a QA community to make it clear to our organizations what is needed in order to make quality matter. Don’t hesitate to ask, even if it doesn’t happen today, if you keep asking, over time it will happen.

Lina Vaisman , another great speaker took the stage, and the room was curious to hear about her topic on “360 Scaling up”. She amazed us with a 360 view of what it takes to scale up a QA organization, a career,?a team and ?last but not least ourselves as ?QA leaders. Her experience of transforming ?organizations where QA was a group that was never utilized to a group that the organization could lean on to deliver value to the customer gave deep insight into how ?QA can become an integral part of any IT organization from the grounds up. All it takes to be there is “QAStrong” - Every day as QA experts we live the challenges of unpredictable changes, yet make things happen. We are defined a new level of strength - “QAStrong”.?

The room was already fired up for another great talk as Fernanda Menks stepped in. It couldn’t get any better. Another great speaker, we felt so lucky to be in such a great conversation “3 tips to bake sweet Quality by Design (QbD) into our client programs“. Her guidance about how to build quality from Day 1 offered a new prospective on how to think about for the group. Her message to the room “Hug the Requirement” was a great way to articulate how QA from day 1 can make a difference and lead the way.?Client matters and how to help them see the value of Quality from Day 1 was so well captured in her presentation.

As their speech ended , many of the attendees found their new mentor as we could see so many curious minds reaching out the Women leaders with their questions.

Throughout the event, Sri Gantakolla hosting along with her trivia was a big part of a well-coordinated event.?

As we got closer to the end of the event, we proposed the idea of hosting a QA Summit in Toronto (#QASummitToronto ) in the coming weeks. It was unanimously voted yes. Yes - Canada needs a?#QASummitToronto and we will continue to work to put it together with our volunteers, sponsors, speakers and organizers and many other groups around the globe to bring the best of the QA world to Canada.

If you like the thought , please share your ask , thoughts , support on #QASummitToronto in the comments .

These female leaders inspired all of us to be proud to be in QA and?gave us so much to think about and how we lead QA in the Canadian and global ecosystem.??Such a great event can’t be pulled together without an awesome space and great organizers. We thank Ari and the entire Accenture team who worked behind the scenes to make it such a successful event.

We want to take a moment to thank our sponsors without whom we could have never made it happen - 埃森哲 , Applitools , Perfecto , Digy4 , MegaQA.

Don’t miss the next event. Stay tuned for our next one ..

QA Community in Toronto getting stronger!?Join us in the mission #qaulitymatters .?

It takes a village to bring a change !

Meetup Group Sign up link: https://www.meetup.com/software-testing-qa/

Ari Rowland Sri Gantakolla Lina Vaisman Sharmila Sivasankaran Fernanda Menks Lina Vaisman Johnny Lam Demitry, QA Lead, Test Automation Engineer Sanjeev Balodia Rahul Khosla