STeP-IN Summit 2018

Connecting Machine Learning, AI, IoT, Blockchain and BigData together.

Having been to the previous few chapters of STeP-IN summit held in Bangalore, I looked forward to networking with the attendees and the mentors this year too.

I network to learn a different perspective which other testers hold and break any myths/biases that I hold. I continued the learning with mentors and gurus this year too who encouraged my participation and offered sound advice to continue to do more.

The first two days of the summit, I was a part of the test autothon contest which opened me to new learning about automation tools, frameworks, and approaches used to automate. We unanimously agreed that it was more an automation contest and less of a testing contest.

The program of three days had one female speaker and one female jury member, to begin with, and upon request we got another senior lady to be a part of the jury.
There is an evident need to encourage and have active participation from the women to attend, volunteer, answer the call for proposals and have their voices heard. Setting up a review and a mentoring group can help to some extent in this regard. Organizations on their part need to provide ample opportunities to the ladies who are interested to learn and provide an in-training-day so there is active participation and equal opportunities/justice served for those who are really interested.

All the jury members got an extra ticket/pass to the conference which we would share with any colleague/friend interested to learn from this experience. Due to some concerns, a friend of mine though has worked for over a decade at the same organization was unable to receive an in-training-day to attend the conference. I tried to get another friend to attend and failed in several instances as she had deadlines to be met and targeted deliveries around the same time.

On the contrary, there were two ladies one from a different city and the other from a different country who had invested in this learning and had taken the efforts to come all the way across the country and the continent to make this learning happen to them. They also showed active participation throughout the event.

Conferences are where I have met mentors who have shared valuable lessons that they learned the hard way, in simple terms.

Some of the participants who made this conferring experience successful learning are: Jayshree Rathod, Pooja, Harish Gowda, Selvi Senthamarai(whose last name I recollected though a decade had elapsed meeting her ;) and who shared that she and my ex-colleagues remember me as different and passionate). Thank you, Selvi for sharing this.

There was an exchange of knowledge with the regular conference goers such as Ravi Suriya, Praveen Daga, Ajay Balamurugadass, Colonel Prabir, Vipul Kocher, Shrini Kulkarni, Mahesh Chikane, Pradeep Soundararajan, Rahul Verma, Ramit Manohar. Missed catching up with Ashok Thiruvengadam.

What I did thoroughly enjoy at the conference was this *debate between the interviewer and the interviewee. Hoped for more minutes to be dedicated to the debate. There is humongous scope for improvement in this arena as we all agree and a very few organizations make an attempt (to focus) on hiring well and make the interviewing experience a pleasant one for all involved. The feedback collected goes in vain as there is no report published nor made transparent. IMHO, in an over a decade's career in testing, I have found one passionate person from the HR department that I look up to who happened to be in the training and development section. And trained the employees in public speaking. Thank you Madhu Kiran.

*Panel Debate - Interviewing testers in the age of AI - What will change?

Thank you, Vinay and Vidhi Baid, Parth Rupani, Pinky Tyagi, Komala, Manjula Suresh and the conference committee of summit 2018 for bringing this learning experience to us. This event happened to be the first testing event that I attended in 2018. Would really like to see new faces sharing hands-on experience relating and relevant to testing, tried attempts(pass/failed) on new learning(experiments conducted and approaches tried) up on the stage in the future events.

Web link of the conference homepage: https://stepinsummit.stepinforum.org
Give this a listen now - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vNKSp5clpo&feature=youtu.be
Quote
The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. ― Rob Siltanen

Reference link: quotesdaily.net