Attending the pre-TestBash Sydney Testers meetup

Arriving in Sydney the day before our presentation at the Ministry of Testing‘s TestBash Australia 2018 conference allowed me (along with Paul Seaman) to attend the pre-TestBash meetup organized by the well-known Sydney Testers group.

The meetup was held in the offices of Gumtree, up on the 22nd floor of the tower at 1 York Street in the CBD. On entering their office, the most striking feature was the simply stunning view it affords their lucky employees of the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge. The other noticeable thing about this relatively newly-renovated space for the company is that it has been furnished using items themselves sourced from the Gumtree platform, so no cookie-cutter corporate office furnishings here!

It was good to see a decent crowd of about thirty people enjoying the free food and drinks before the “main event”, viz. Trish Koo with her short presentation on “The Future of Testing”. She covered some interesting predictions in her talk, including:

• Exploratory Testing will be really weird
• End to end testing will become meaningless
• Black box testing will be cool again
• Testers may be the only ones who can stop the robot apocalypse

This was at least a very different treatment compared to the many similarly-named talks out there. Her hand-drawn slides were another point of difference and she certainly got some interesting reactions from the audience! The Q&A afterwards was engaging, but still left ample time for us all to mingle before we formally overstayed our welcome at Gumtree!

It was good to see Richard Bradshaw there representing Ministry of Testing as well as TestBash Australia conference organizers, David Greenlees and Anne-Marie Charrett. Thanks to Sam Connelly and the Sydney Testers crew for putting on a good meetup in the run up to TestBash, it’s always good to mingle with the local testing community before a major event in another city.

(First three photos above from Michele Playfair, the last one from Paul Maxwell-Walters.)