I am excited to announce an initiative in QualiTest US to take greater strides in the software testing community, where we start to participate in more community activities and get to know our fellow testers more! As a part of this initiative, we have instigated a Meetups approach! We really like the idea of Meetups, as it gives us the change to get involved with so many groups, with many different topics and interests, right in our area!
Last week, a QualiTest group comprised of both Fairfield, CT and Bronx, NY employees, attended their first Meetup. With 8 participants, 6 of them remembered to wear their QualiTest shirt! Our first group meetup was a part of the NYC Testers Meetup. Around 35-40 people from various companies around the New York area attended the event, which was held in New York City. The event started with a presentation on the topic “The Flow of Product Quality” in Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) by Matt Barcomb.He did a great job in highlighting the key areas of SDLC.
But don’t just take my word for it! Let’s hear what some of our other QualiTest attendees thought –
“The concept that project structure reflects organizational structure is interesting. This would be useful when initiating new efforts to ensure that work is distributed to the appropriate resources. Also interesting was the diagram for improving coordination between different sections of a team through the separation of basic, advanced, and meta knowledge. In my own work, it is useful to have a common dialogue when coordinating with someone who specializes in a field outside of coding. This happens to be a principle I have unconsciously used when trying to communicate with clients. This allows both sides to have a common enough understanding in order to effectively develop solutions to problems.”
“I thought that the presentation for this meeting was excellent. The presenter was able to captivate the audience through his many analogies using famous people and old films. It was great that we went as a team. It successfully published our names, as a company. I had an opportunity to meet with the person organizing the event and she had not heard of QualiTest, but was very impressed that we came as a group. As this meetup occurs monthly, I am looking forward to the next NYC Testers meetup. As I have experienced from previous meetups, there are often people that present at this forum that have affected real change in the field.”
This exposure helped me understand the different work culture and testing methodologies being followed by different companies around the New York metropolitan area. It also gave me an opportunity to network with other software test engineers in the area and also spread awareness about our company’s goals and work culture, which I believe is crucial for us to attract talented engineers. Overall the experience was very informative and enriching. I look forward to being a part of more such experiences in the future.
“I really enjoyed the group discussion that happened after the presentation. During this session we were divided into three groups with focus on three different topics. The participants could choose the group/topic they would want to discuss. The three topics we discussed were: “test automation”, “role of testers in software development” and “automation vs manual testing”. Being keen on understanding the different testing methods employed by software testers in other companies and to learn from their experiences, I chose to join the group that discussed the role of testers in software development. In my group, we shared our experiences as software test engineers and gave each other constructive opinions on their methods.
An interesting case was brought up by Mr. Adam Rosenberg (Sr. QA Analyst, HUGE). He mentioned that in his company, the software test engineers and developers work together as a cohesive unit to resolve the issues encountered during product development; he said that the physical proximity between developers and testers enables finding more defects and ensures speedy rectification of these defects. Although I understand the obvious advantages of having such a system, I disagreed with Mr. Rosenberg on a few areas, which I discussed with him and the rest of the group. I feel that with an efficient organization and with good methods in place, the same (if not better!) results can be achieved with outsourcing, where the testing and development groups are often geographically displaced. Also, while such cohesive teams are easier to manage and economically viable in smaller companies and start-ups, this method is generally not preferred in larger organizations or in bigger projects due to the challenges at the administrative level and cost constraints. To explain my point, I explained the model we follow in my group at Qualitest (Sirius XM project), where we achieve impressive results consistently using a physically independent development-testing model.”
“The discussion was a high level talk about inspiring employees to be the best testers they can be. Matt Barcomb explained the Flow of Product Quality, and did a great job of explaining what it was like to go from a programmer to a manager, and how difficult it is to manage people in roles you’ve never done. Barcomb argued that an organization is built on its structure of different types of specialist people communicating and collaborating together to produce the highest quality-value product.
I found the Meet-up to be a valuable learning experience as to what it’s like to travel with coworkers and be able to speak about what our company does. I really loved discussing what our company did in comparison to other companies. You don’t really get a sense of how different it is being a testing-only company rather than product driven until you actually discuss what other people have to do to collaborate between their departments. I have a new appreciation for how specialization can breed innovation.
I want to thank Qualitest for the opportunity to travel and represent the company. If nothing else, remember: Functional test where you have to, Unit test whenever you can!”
