Just got back from Rotterdam, and what a great conference, Test Automation Days. Here’s a summary of my experience.
I’ve arrived early on Tuesday, and walked around Rotterdam, as my room wasn’t ready yet. The weather we got all week, for early March, was very nice and warm. Ish.
Wednesday was Masterclass day. There were two sets of workshops, and mine, “Exploratory Testing with Postman” was in the afternoon. It was a full room, and people were very engaged. We did exercises on charters, exploring single APIs and full workflows.
At the end of the day, there were drinks, and the Speaker’s dinner. I’ve already met a couple of familiar faces in the morning, like Bas Dijkstra, Elizabeth Zagroba , Christian Baumann, Irja Straus, Linda van de Vooren, Anaïs van Asselt, and of course, Ard Kramer and Jan Jaap Cannegieter, and already had a few new acquaintances.
The speaker’s dinner was nice, and the place good to have all the conversation, without people shouting, as sometimes happens with a big group. Food was good (especially the bisque. Man, good soup is good).
Test Automation Days – Conference Day
On Thursday, we had four keynotes, and some parallel track talks. First keynote, by Fiona Charles, was about understanding the place of the automation tester and AI. The main message was “Don’t outsource your intelligence”. AI can generate anything, but only based on what people have done in the past. Our intelligence, reasoning, creativity – the things that can create new ideas – are the ones we can’t, and don’t want to outsource. If you’re worried about your job, these are the things that will keep you being employed. Meeting Fiona again was great as always.
Next was Corina-Adina Pip‘s keynote “Putting Quality Back into QA” was an important one for me, as it corresponded a lot with how I consider automation, what it includes and the skills needed to become a good automation person. I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again – automation is development, you need to understand software development, and become proficient in the skills involved. Corina showed examples of using things, like assertTrue(True) in the code, which shows some people are missing the basics of testing. Remember kids: Automation == Development, treat it as such.
Next were a couple of track talks. The first I went to was “Spoonfuls of TDD and a Pinch of AI“, by Puja Jagani. Now, I’m doing a webinar on TDD in the age of AI soon (you should really come!), so I was curious.
It was a nice talk, but didn’t involve “real TDD”, as in the incremental process. It was test-first, and the process of iteratively milking Chat GPT for the right (or expected) code, and the arduous cycles it takes for code in the Selenium project – so real-life, not just a calculator. I agree with her experience, and I’ll go deep-diving into that in my upcoming webinar.
Next was one my favorite subjects lately – accessibility testing, by Razvan Vancea. I met Razvan a day before, and we discussed a couple of ideas around accessibility, and how hard it is to push for it. Razvan’s talk went into the details of standards, tools and how it’s not only important, how easy it is to make giant steps in accessibility testing, without much hassle.
After lunch, it was my keynote “The Lost Art Of Test Design“. We don’t do enough of test design, and that’s not a good thing. With proper design, we can come up with cheaper tests to get more information. The keynote was interactive, and people were inspired (my experience from later discussions). I brought examples, and memes. Unfortunately, you won’t get a video, as the talks were not recorded, but I’m betting there will be a repeat in the future.
Skipping a session, I then went to Christian Baumann‘s pop-up talk (not planned and excellently executed), about AI vs. The Gilded Rose. It was a case study about how different LLM engines are good at coming up with test cases for the Gilded Rose. I use the Gilded Rose kata in my refactoring classes, and it was an interesting use of the code, as also checking where we are on the “AI is replacing us” meter. Good news, we’re not there yet.
Final keynote was by Andrew Knight, on the death of BDD. Ok, it’s not really dead, but it has some symptoms around the tools. But the ideas live on! And Andrew gave a nice introduction to how BDD, and future tools can help move us further on Behavior development. Interesting ideas, and since I’m a proponent of all X-DD methodologies, It will be interesting to see where it goes now.
And that was the conference. Cool people, interesting talks, good balance of AI and “other stuff”. The main message of the conference was “Future proofing – finding the right balance”. We can improve in different ways.
Next up! Nordic Testing Days in May. See you there!
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