So last Saturday i went with my team mates at TinyOwl to attend VodQA workshop at ThoughtWorks Pune ,sounds interesting right, well stop guessing vodQA is Value oriented discussion on Quality Analysis ,where anyone and not just quality engineers meet to learn and share on focused topics related to QA.The event details were already planned on facebook group this time the theme was agile testing practices
This was our first time to ThoughtWorks Pune and vodQA ,so we left Mumbai early morning and reached the venue a bit early and since we had time for getting introduced to other enthusiasts we started discussing our problems among us .after registrations, breakfast and the keynote ,we saw around 100 or more attendees which included QA,developers,experts and product managers too.
Hands On activities
We started with a agile game where we were divided into team of 8 members and a product owner .each team was given a product prototype as a ballon with a sketched pattern and teams were supposed to deliver quality replicas , this simple game gave few lessons each iterations and improved our process and delivery each time .After this game we received a talk on agile testing and best practices and discussed on common problems and how to deal with them.
Second activity was really interesting and involved a QA ,product manager and a team conversation.product manager was giving series of tasks to QA who can take some help from his team under different situations ,like the QA was asked repeatedly to test a ball with no requirements specified and then with few assumptions under place .Again we talked about the best practices for communication ,collaboration with peers ,stakeholders and managers under agile environment.
These activities were all eye openers full of lessons ,of course fun too .
Talks
I heard that ThoughtWorks do a lot of pair programming and yes they do pair for Talks as well.we had a talk on effective ways of testing with a global team and a couple of talks on Test Automation their patterns and practices which was very helpful .The speakers shared their experiences from past projects and came up with tested principles that should be followed when performing a test automation with example of a mobile UI tests.Another helpful talk was given by Anand about test automation patters that highlighted the importance of quality for testing code and how to maintain it , he also shared and discussed solutions to common problems faced with maintaining a large testing frameworks.
Event
Overall event went well with all the activities and arrangements including lunch were great.If you finds an interesting upcoming event to be held at ThoughtWorks, Pune, you should definitely attend and contribute to it.we hope to contribute soon in coming vodqa events .
While coming back we were happy that we not just learned but also made new friends and shared our learnings and solutions to other testers problems ,also we were able validate our current practices and process at par with ThoughtWorks. you can get the events presentations from here
in case your’e wondering looking the pic we are hemant ,ulhas ,me and jitendra (clockwise) ,and yeah we were happy since it was first official off Saturday for from tinyowl.
