Experience Report - ConTEST NYC

20th Nov, Wednesday

Anna Royzman and a team of volunteers hosted the ConTEST NYC conference in Nov 2019. http://testmastersacademy.org/

At the speaker's dinner, Anna shared her first experience of hosting the conference. Her experience helped me understand - there will be lows and highs careerwise, never give up, and continue to work towards the goal.

21st Nov, Thursday

Derive Good Test Data from Production Data without Breaking Privacy Laws

By Martin Boesgaard

Martin presented a talk on 'Derive Good Test Data from Production Data without Breaking Privacy Laws' and how PII Guard can help anonymize, encrypt, and preserve the privacy and security of the test data.

Deliberate Practice in Practice

By Dwayne Green

I met Dwayne at CAST 2014 conference held here in NYC.

Dwayne is confident in his delivery and shared the need for everyday test practice and provided practical examples of how to do the same. I felt my presentation would be an extension of Dwayne's talk as my talk was about the 5WH(What, Where, When, Who, Why, and How) of test practice. Dwayne used sticky notes to gather feedback on his talk, and I liked this idea to receive feedback when it is not collected as part of the program. I asked him about it, and he shared that Google docs(Speaker shares the link to the same during the talk) can be used to do the same.

I also wished to attend this talk by Aleksander Lipski 'Testing in Uncharted Waters - Introducing the Change in the New Domains' but since it was a parallel track with Dwayne's session I missed it.

If you register to TestMastersAcademy on slack, you can get access to all the talks recorded at ConTEST NYC. Also liked the idea of testers coaching other testers.

Testing In Production

By Talia Nassi

Initially, I couldn't understand the why and how of testing in production. Having tried it twice at two different organizations (a startup and at another large firm) that I earlier worked with who showed no interest in it. Also, the programmers panicked and the authority went berserk when I merely suggested it. I realized to implement this, management buy-in is absolutely necessary.

Especially, testing for software security in production with tools (not brought but those that are available for free) and without permission from the top is next to impossible. Try it but with caution.

In all the contexts that I have been in, implementing 'Testing in Production' was/is doable. It will take a new breed of testers and leaders to achieve this.

Tools, Games, and Activities to generate test ideas.

By Jyothi Rangaiah

After attending the above talks, I understood that I have to begin my talk by stating the context to which this problem and solution exists.

In my talk, I shared how to use inexpensive(free and unapproved) testing tools and informal methods to help train testers to generate test ideas in environments that lack a training budget for testers and also lack test leaders.

My talk began by stating the problems that we testers faced as new testers and the sources we heavily relied on to gather new test ideas. This was followed by tried, tested, and implemented solutions in my context to address these practical problems. I understood that my context in which I have experimented and derived these solutions can be different from the context of some of the audience at this conference. By the end of the presentation, I felt I had made a connection with the audience who are/were in a similar/same context as mine.

Troubleshooting the fudge out of it

By Corina Pip

Initially, I did not understand the placement of the word 'fudge' in the title, Googled it.

Corina shared ways of troubleshooting from dependency, hardware, build, version, and configuration perspective and how to reproduce a seemingly impossible bug. I liked the Q & A at the end of her talk. A topic such as this needs to be presented at various other conferences.

Leading when the subject matter experts test

By Jesper Ottosen

Jesper shared how to coach and train testers in leading and not just manual testing, and about volunteering with anecdotes relating to the Danish way of living and working. Being an active volunteer himself, he conveyed it best.

Nov 22nd, Friday

The reality of testing in an artificial world.

By Angie Jones 

Angie shared her experience testing in the advertisement domain and learning how a machine learns.

Testing breadthwise and testing from a holistic view was the highlight of Angie's talk. I advocate testing holistically and could connect with her efforts in finding bugs in the tool, machine, algorithm, code, design and beyond.

The new skill set for the new QA specialist

By Joel Montvelisky

Joel shared relevant practices and practice methods he uses to learn and test products with valuable analogies. The key takeaways were on point, I liked this slide from his talk. In my view, in contexts that are not agile and are adamant to change, Change is more than a revolution. I am sure, Joel agrees with me on this.

Getting started with accessibility

By Dillon Carney

An introduction to accessibility building and testing was shared in Dillon's talk. Passionate towards his work and building a community for a11y enthusiasts he shared how he approached learners and his journey to getting people to be as passionate as he is about the work he is doing at his organization.

Calling BullShit(BS) on busy: Secrets of Time Management, Productivity + Organization

By Andrew Mellen

This is my favorite topic, as I call BS on busy several times a day. Tips on organization reminded me a bit of Marie Kondo, Andrew's energy is palpable.

Experts Panel

Q and A with Lisa Crispin, Jason Huggins, Angie Jones, and Lalit Bhamare only reinstated this:

• WE are all in this together.
• Our learning(testing) methods, techniques, tools may be different but the ultimate goal is finding bugs introduced in requirement phase, in the design and coding phase, in understanding a clients requirements, not to blindly follow but learn how it learns (referring to machine learning), test the tool, question the written and said word.
• Tester's goal remains the same to work on improving the quality of software.
• Support each other, there can be a difference of opinions and yet we can all be in this together, did I already say that!
• Meeting other testers from the growing community of Test Masters Academy remains the highlight for me at ConTEST NYC.

Thank you, Anna Royzman and Tanya for creating a platform for this learning to happen.

References: https://contestnyc2019.sched.com/

Photos by Jyothi Rangaiah.

Photo of the speaker's dinner by a volunteer.