TribalQonf : Day 1 Experience

Finally the day came today when the test conference which was the most awaited and having most awesome lineup full of #testingleaders around the world as speakers started.

Yes, I am talking about none other than TribalQonf, the biggest virtual testing conference of 2020, arranged by The Test Tribe Community.

And since it was virtual, 520+ testers participated from around 36 countries.

It started with the introduction for conference by the host of the conference Lalit Bhamare, followed by introduction of The Test Tribe Community by founder tribal Mahesh Chikane.

All the sessions were very informative and followed up by Q&A, and whatever questions were not taken up as part of Q&A due to time constraints were later addressed on the slack channel.

Then the first session was by James Bach on "Weaving Testing: Thread by Thread".

It was a very interesting session, busting the #mythsintesting and how #testing is actually conjuction of multiple activities and how it should carried out. Also how testing is a continuous activity.

I can say that below was one of the key takeaways from the session, which is applicable to testing as well:

Now the Second Session was by Rahul Verma on "Designing a Selenium Based Automation Framework - With Examples using Arjuna".

Arjuna is a well documented open-source (yes you read that correctly, well documented and open-source) test automation framework based on Python.

He very beautifully explained the characteristics of a good test automation framework which he has already implemented in Arjuna, also how one can apply such things in their own automation framework.

Some of the key takeaways are that framework should have test data or element data separate from logic, if you are working with application which may need localisation then take care of that in easily maintainable manner; and to develop a framework one must need to understand good coding and/or design principles as a good framework may have only around 10% of actual selenium code(if we talk about web ui automation), the rest of things require the knowledge which I mentioned earlier.

The Third Session was by Pradeep Soundararajan on "The Business Value of Testing".

He explained it with some great analogies, e.g. testing/testers in business are like "salt" in the meal, it's value may not be visible directly, but it is mostly realised when there is absence of it or it is not in the expected manner.

He also explained how testers can showcase their value in a visible manner and how things like helping and/or impacting other testers can play a vital role in it.

So after having so much "food for brain", it was time to take break to have "food for body" (suitable for lunch break as per IST).

After the break, we met again for the Fourth Session of the day by Nishi Grover Garg on "Adapting a simplified Risk-Based Testing Approach".

She very wonderfully explained that why we should do take the Risk based approach for Testing and what kind of advantages it have over the approach generally used where we don't consider risk.

She also taught what kind of risks can be there and how to assess the different kind of risks by the probability and impact of a risk, taking both a real world (outside the work) example and a real work (application/testing) related example.

The Fifth Session of the day was taken by Ramit Manohar Kaul named "Tribal Qonf's Aryabhatta : Dare to Challenge Yourself".

And as the name suggests, it was really challenging.

It was a puzzle/quiz competition, but the twist here was that it doesn't depend upon your existing knowledge.

It forced to give your best by thinking logically, analytically, unbiased and pushing to your limits; teaching and giving us the real life example of how we as a tester should think.

It was really very wonderful and fun experience.

The Sixth Session of the day was taken by Davar Ardalan on "Introducing Cultural Intelligence to AI".

She explained in detail the importance of having "Cultural Intelligence" in AI and how they are trying to achieve it.

She also explained wonderfully that how the Testers are supposed to play key roles for such things.

The Seventh Session of the day was presented by Shama Ugale and Omkar Khatavkar on "On-demand Distributed Testing with Selenium Grid and Terra-form on Cloud".

First they explained on the challenges with traditional UI Automation setup like speed of execution (if not using grid), too many dependencies (for local infra), costing (for cloud providers), etc.

Then they explained and gave demo on how can we solve all such types of challenges using STAKI, an On-demand cloud based solution with IaC (Infrastructure as Code), created by them.

Then after a short break, we met again for the Eighth Session of the day presented by Ajay Balamurugadas on "Lessons from 14 Years of Software Testing Career".

He not only shared his journey, but also shared his experiences and also very important, useful and practical tips for the testers regarding how to grow as a Tester.

He also explained what are the common mistakes one do in their career growth as a Tester and how to avoid that.

Below is one of the such useful tips on what one should do based on their experience level:

The Ninth Session of the day presented by Soumya Mukherjee on "Continuous Testing in DevOps".

He explained in detail with a demo that why and how one should leverage UI and API layer Test Automation and use it in a manner which can be helpful in a fast paced Agile Environment.

Before wrapping up for the day, there was Panel Discussion on "Testing after 2020" with Aparajita Mathur, Ashok Thiruvengadam, Rahul Verma and Pradeep Soundararajan.

It was a very interesting and wonderful discussion.

Learnt a lot from the opinions of experts on how they think the changes would be for Testers and Testing after 2020 in terms of expectations, roles, responsibilities, skillsets, etc.

There were many interesting takeaways but the one I would like to mention here is that how we should see testing as "Testing" and should not differentiate like "manual" and "automation" or "manual vs automation".

To conclude, it was beyond amazing experience and learnt a lot from the leaders of testing from across the Globe; eagerly looking forward to Day 2.