Review of the Paris Test Conf
On 21/11/19 took place the first edition of the Paris Test Conf which is a conference created by software test enthusiasts and without sponsors. They were just helped by Agile France for some tasks: administration, looking for insurance, various and varied expenses to advance. When you are a volunteer and want to gather 150 people for a day at a reasonable price (150€ a day with breakfast, meals and drinks) this is a huge advantage. Once on site, no sponsors with goodies and no talk or keynote with a product to show or any other company selling its merits as a leader in France and around the world.
Talks
“A week as an agile tester/Une semaine dans ma peau de testeur agile” by Jean-Pierre Lambert
Jean-Pierre no longer needs to be introduced (at least in France), follow the link if you really need it.
This is a rather classic subject: what does a tester do in an agile team? When, what and how to help as a tester when nothing is over?
And over a week described by Jean-Pierre with humour we realize that the agile tester does many, many things:
He brings a lot to the rest of the team, which can focus on its own tasks: risk analysis, log analysis, exploratory, peer-testing, peer-programming, Community Of Practice, technical-functional analysis, quality facilitation/testing methods, in connection with the PO and the devs, he can also check with users that what is planned is consistent.
The video should be published soon, in the meantime here are the slides if you can read French:
“Fonctional tests on native mobile apps: a successful story” by Kevin Roulleau
Kevin is currently freelancing for JobTeaser, but his talk talks more about his previous experience at Happn a dating application. He explains why he chose Appium (for iOS and Android tests when he doesn’t know Swift or Java), WebdriverIO and Cucumber with a classic Page Object pattern. Then how to integrate all this into Jenkins with Saucelabs. He is also the author of sauce-storage and which allows you to upload files from your local computer to saucelabs. Convenient to upload mobile applications to be tested directly from the code.
He will end by talking about personal development and the importance of contributing to Open Source projects.
Appium is not the easiest to handle, so he explains that he has been able to progress, overcome his impostor syndrome and contribute to the open source projects he uses through meditation, hypnotherapy and non-violent communication. Does that surprise you? Yes, we can’t only treat ourselves with beer and pizzas in our profession!
“Simplify your development and testing with docker/Simplifier vos développements et vos tests avec docker” by Paul Leclercq et Arnaud Bailly.
No, this presentation was not too technical (it was a remark that has been raised), Docker is. Docker is technical but can be of great help to us as a tester, so we need to know it to consider Docker every time it answers one of our problems. Docker is perfect for testing on several environments with some differences. Ideal also for automating builds on continuous integration environments. It allows you to have all kinds of test data and do whatever you want with it without being afraid of breaking or losing something. And finally, it is ideal for sharing environments even if you use totally different machines (a Mac and a Windows for example). If several Docker containers are needed, then docker-compose will be the answer.
“Back Market: one year after/Back Market : un an après” by Thomas Lelong
After lunch, Thomas tells us about his journey over the past year where he was given the task of setting up a QA team at Back Market. While he did not have the profile initially, thanks to the shift left mindset, iterations and communication he was able to carry out his mission successfully. I am curious to see how this will evolve for this growing company, as scaling up is always a perilous exercise.
AXA’s test guild provides feedback on its test strategy, particularly in terms of automation, with a focus on key paths. Technically, Azure DevOps is used with VMs (and not Docker because of the need for a graphical interface). They wondered if they should use On-premise or Cloud environments, the latter having been chosen for reasons of speed of availability, scalability and maintainability. This solution has made it possible to reduce the costs and execution times of the tests, even if 2 hours still seems too long to me, but we know that VMs are very long to create and launch.
“Agility in my management/De l’Agilité dans mon management” by Bertrand Foucault
In this atypical talk, Bertrand Foucault talks about agility, management, emotion and above all positivity. If you are comfortable with yourself and others, then creativity and performance will be there. Not to be neglected!
“Stories of software failures: how about better testing?/Histoires d’échecs logiciels : et si on testait mieux ?” by Stéphane Colson
The last subject was mine, I’m not particularly well placed to give a feedback about how it was good or bad. Anyway, I was happy to have been able to share these few stories that took place at Knight Capital, Bank Of America, Google, Facebook, Flickr, Nikon, Apple, Microsoft…etc
I missed Amazon story for going around the GAFAM (was it voluntary?) and so I thank the person who share this Amazon story who missed the implementation of an automatic CV analysis tool.
The final word
At the level of the organization and the organizers, there is almost nothing to say because everything went perfectly. The timing was respected without overflow, the food was very good and in sufficient quantity, Klaxoon made it possible to boost interactions with the participants.
The discussions I was able to have with a few other participants were very rich and interesting. It is always good to get out of your daily life to find other testers. Many make the same remark that they often feel alone in their work. This kind of event is good for morale because I realize that we all have almost the same struggles, the same passion and sometimes the same solutions to problems.
I just regret I hadn’t been able to talk to people I’ve already been in contact with virtually (via twitter, linkedin, Slack or by phone) and that I didn’t recognize. If the names had been bigger on the badges, it might have made things easier.
Conclusion: test is not dead, on the contrary it is coming back in force and this conference is the perfect illustration of this. Long live the Paris Test Conf, maybe with international speakers in 2020 (you, dear reader?).
Originally published at https://lyontesting.fr on December 5, 2019.
