The first TEAM meetup of 2016 – starting as we mean to go on

The seventh TEAM meetup and first of 2016 was held on 21st January, in the offices of Education Services Australia (thanks to them for providing the venue). Our membership stood at just over 300 before this seventh event and we had a sell-out of 60 RSVPs.

After a short introduction from me, it was time for the first presentation from Paul Crimmins (from AHPRA), “Introduction to Session-based Test Management (SBTM) and use of Rapid Reporter”. Paul gave an excellent talk on his experience of learning and applying session-based test management, with some practical recommendations around management buy-in and reporting within the constraints of existing toolsets (e.g. HP ALM). It was also good to see a case study of using Rapid Reporter and how that helps Paul to more easily take and accumulate his notes from sessions of exploratory testing. A great presentation and lots of Q&A followed – it was wonderful to hear from others who are also actually applying SBTM in their organizations, this is no longer a lunatic fringe and is considered mainstream now in agile teams.

A short break allowed the group of about 35 to network and and clean up what was left of the pizzas. It was another passionate and engaged group so the conversations flowed easily and it was good to see some newcomers getting involved too.

The second presentation came in two parts, from two guys working at Education Services Australia, Chatham Vidanagamage and Chandra Kesarapu. They talked about introducing test automation as a practice within ESA with Chatham focusing on the challenges involved (management buy-in, budgets, choice of technology, etc.) while Chandra talked in more detail about the technical implementation of the automation.

        

For further meetup announcements, remember to follow our meetup.com page at:

http://www.meetup.com/Test-Engineering-Alliance-Melbourne/

Also keep an eye on our website, http://www.testengineeringalliance.com, where you will find all of our different offerings – including the opportunity to take the Rapid Software Testing course with the one and only Michael Bolton and a brand new testing conference, Australian Testing Days, all happening in May 2016.