The annual conference organized by RTC (Romanian Testing Community) has grown, since the previous edition, in what matters most: content. From three to ten speakers, from one day with three sessions to two days, the first with two parallel four session tracks, and the second dedicated to two workshops held by Paul Gerrard and Andy Harding. This year the same number of participants have received five times more content. But the exchange on information was not limited to the scheduled talks. The strong point of the conference was the warm atmosphere and the speakers" interactivity. Each break was filled with open discussions, most of them evolving in long private sessions that stretched to the next break.
The most eloquent example is Scott Barber, who joined the conference by sheer coincidence (he was in the area, with a 2-3 days break between contracts and reached out to local communities volunteering to help out), but would constantly offer feedback, both during the talks, but also after, and not just to the attendees, more often to the speakers themselves. He confessed to being actually happy about the choice to join in since the general feeling and the active interest of the attendees, places Cluj IT community and conferences in his top personal favorites, outclassing the big international conferences overcrowded with marketing and vendors.
We took advantage of this open attitude and asked a few questions for our readers:
Name top three must attend international conferences.
Name your top three sources of information for QA.
Name top three tools in your daily routine and one severely underrated hidden gem.
What is the top upcoming paradigm in software testing?
Scott Barber
There are two types of conferences:
The big ones, dominated by product demos, mainly oriented on networking and sales. For example: CAST (Conference of the Association for Software Testing) - scheduled for August in U.S.A.; or Let"s Test - a yearly conference in Sweden (May) and Australia (August and September).
The small ones, with invitation based access and tight topics, and a clear goal of dealing with one of the current software testing challenges. I strongly recommend this type of conferences. For example: WOPR (Workshop on Performance and Reliability) or DEWT (Dutch Exploratory Workshop on Testing).
AST (Association for Software Testing) blog is a very good aggregated source of information.
MindMap, Lucidchart, Jing and Skype. An underrated tool would be SmartDraw.
Most conferences are filled with ongoing rants about aligning testing with business goals (ex. Profitability). I call it the Business Side of Testing and it"s the main high level concern of the testing community.
Scott Barber
Gabor Torok
Google Testing Conference, Selenium Conference, DevOps Day Europe.
Gojko - Acceptance TDD - weekly newsletter; Google Testing blog.
People are an essential source of information: Michael Bolton, Miagi-Do blog. Books and direct interaction: meetups, gatherings (SheffieldTestGathering).
Jira, Confluence, TestRail, Twitter. Most important and underrated tool is the brain. I use mine daily!
Software Testing Club (ministryoftesting.com), Gojko.net, Michael Bolton, Seth Godin.
Mindmap, LeanCanvas, JMeter. Indirectly connected to testing Competing Values Framework.
The evolution from process driven to relationship driven process and cross functional teams.
Brîndușa Axon
We hope that next year we will be spoiled with the same large amount of high quality content, maybe even more, in the same relaxed family like atmosphere.
