Introducing MYOB Future Makers Academy Test Labs
At MYOB we help businesses succeed. We also do more than that. We are proud of helping people succeed through sponsoring local conferences, hosting tech meetups, and running fantastic initiatives like DevelopHER. This support not only gives back to the community but it also helps us attract the right people to MYOB and provides us with valuable growth opportunities. It was with this in mind that our Melbourne MYOB Quality Community of Practice (CoP) came together to organise the first ever Future Makers Academy (FMA) Test Lab.
What are FMA Test Labs?
FMA Test Labs are a platform for running software quality related workshops that are available to the public. This initiative was organised by our Melbourne MYOB Quality CoP in conjunction with the Future Makers Academy and is the first MYOB platform which focuses on allowing our own team members to offer external training on software engineering topics. The workshops are organised and facilitated by volunteers from within MYOB.
Why did we decide to do these workshops?
We are at the forefront in new technologies and we are passionate about quality and the approaches we take. Through attending conferences and meetups we have observed that there is a large gap between the industry standard and our own quality standards at MYOB. More importantly we also noted that there was a lack of opportunity for people to learn and up-skill in the areas that we value. We realised that if nothing changed the current gap was only going to continue to grow larger. We saw this as an opportunity for us to offer workshops to the general public which would be mutually beneficial to both the software engineering community as well as MYOB. The main value we see for these workshops includes:
1. We want to attract the right people to MYOB. The FMA Test Labs gives us the opportunity to help improve the skills of the people who attend whilst sharing with them some of the practices that we value at MYOB. The workshop embodies the MYOB values and our ways of working. We would encourage anyone who has attended a workshop and is interested in working with us to apply for a role (we’re hiring).
2. Teaching is a great way to learn. When our team members stop and question what quality practices are worth sharing and how they would convey that information, they often reach a greater understanding themselves. The presenters also often spend time studying and refining their own skills on these subjects as well improving their presentation and public speaking skills.
3. Our team members want the opportunity to share. Despite requiring additional effort on top of their existing workload, we have had great engagement from our MYOB Quality Analysts (QA’s) for these workshops. Our QA’s have been eager to get involved in planning and running workshops and are more engaged team members at MYOB as a result.
4. They aren’t only for external people. Team members that want to learn about these subjects are also welcome to join in on a workshop, and we have already had some go through the first workshop with us. We are working with the Future Makers Academy to see how we can offer these workshops to all proteges and new starters.
5. They bring us all together. MYOB is a large workplace where we spend a lot of our time working directly with our crews or tribes. These workshops help give opportunity for interested parties from different and unrelated areas of the business to come together and work on a common project and to learn from each other.
How were the workshops organised?
We started with asking for volunteers from our Melbourne MYOB Quality CoP who would be interested in helping to plan, coordinate and facilitate. These volunteers discussed various options and formats of how to solve the knowledge gap we were seeing outside of MYOB and agreed on the idea of the FMA Test Labs. After careful consideration, the group decided that our first workshop offering would be an introduction to automation workshop called “Web Automation Foundations”. From there it was a matter of breaking down the content, selecting owners for each section and coordinating the presentation.
When the workshop was run a second time it was by a different group of volunteers. They also took the opportunity to improve and refine the content based on feedback. These groups were able to self organise and volunteers were encouraged to come to an agreement with their managers on using MYOB time towards this project as a self development opportunity.
What have we done so far?
The FMA Test Labs have already run two successful rounds of our first workshop “Web Automation Foundations”. These workshops were run in April and July 2019 and they were both very successful. We advertised the workshops on LinkedIn and through our partner meetup group Test Engineering Alliance of Melbourne, and sold out all seats within 24 hours.
The workshop involved getting people together and providing a simple but powerful solution for automated testing of web applications, giving the attendees the foundations to then take away what they built during the workshop and learn more in their own time. During the workshop we outlined the basic concepts of test automation principles as well as introducing attendees to Python. We went from recording a basic scenario, to transforming the test into a Page Object Model to build reliable and easy to maintain tests.
We are eager to hold more rounds of this workshop, and adding additional workshops to the FMA Test Labs.
Written By Scott Miles & Irina Babicheva
