Mobile Refresh 2018 from a tester’s perspective

Fabio Choupina
Sep 9, 2018 · 3 min read

For those who doesn’t know much about the Mobile Refresh event I’ll try to explain in a few words, but basically is an one-day event based in Wellington — NZ for mobile technology enthusiasts. According to the organizers:

Mobile Refresh Wellington will provide content for designers, developers, testers, or just about anyone passionate about mobile development

I’m happy to say that, yes, there was content specific for testers, but I still think that we can have more sessions targeting testers, which I know relies completely on the wilingness of testers to speak.

Keynote — 12 years on: a retrospective

Zarah Dominguez — @zarahjutz

The event couldn’t have had a better keynote, Zarah had the courage to share what most (if not all) of us feel as professionals: our struggles and weaknesses. Other than that, she also broke some paradigms like that creating complex code is smart because no one can understand:

The real genius is the one that can create several bits of simple things and turn it into brilliant solutions.

The parts I liked the most were the ones where she acknowledged it’s all right to not know something. There’s always someone cooler than you, so there’s no need to feel afraid or not confident enough to voice your ideas. Let go, if you spend time writing and rewriting your code and making sure it’s perfect before you send it to the code review just because you’re afraid what others might think of you, you’ll never be able to work. Trust your teammates, let go!

Mobile Testing, Automation, Manual or Hybrid

Tony Parrott

This was a really good talk from Tony because, as testers, we’re always discussing what we should automate and how much manual testing we need. The most amazing thing was hear for the first time about Emotional Testing, how do we feel when we’re actually using the product? I mean, all automated tests are passing and no major bugs were found during the manual check, but does that mean someone is going to use our app? Are users willing to pay for it? How long is the installation/uninstallation timelime? How many people are using it? That’s definitely something to take under consideration when testing, not sure how we would measure it yet though.

Side note: the room was expecting 30 people and there were around 50. Happy to see lots of people interested in testing.

Fearless coding with test driven development

Roberto Allende@robertoallende

This talk was announced only on the conference day, but I made sure I would watch it. TDD when performed correctly only brings value to the team and doesn’t slow anyone down, so I got really excited when I read fearless coding next to TDD!

The session was more technical than the other ones, which was good because we could see how to do it and its feasibility. One other thing that was really interesting was that Roberto created 5 different levels of TDD adoption, so that you can start trying doing small bits and as you see value and understand how to go to the other levels you’re already applying something! I’m not talk about the different levels but you can see the slides here.

Side note 2: the room was also full

Other sessions I’ve attended

I’ve also attended 3 more sessions: Making Things do stuff, Android and iOS - a 100% fully serious comparison and But doesn’t everyone with a smartphone speak English?

I’ve really enjoyed all 3 sessions and could learn a lot of things about IoT, differences between iOS and Android, and the impact that the difference between translation and localisation can have on the users.

Even though these sessions are not targeting testers, I think it’s important to go there and take a looksee. There are many things we can do to improve as professionals and learning a bit from other areas is one of them.

Wrapping up

Just like I’ve just learned with Zarah, I won’t try to write and rewrite this post until it’s perfect, I’ll let go and learn from the feedback I will receive knowing that I gave my best.

Big thanks to the organisers and speakers!

Wellington Testers

A place to share articles, tutorials and knowledge within the testers community

Fabio Choupina

Written by

Mobile Tester at BNZ and one of the organisers of the Wellington Testers Meetup

Wellington Testers

A place to share articles, tutorials and knowledge within the testers community

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