Pre-TiCCA19 conference meetup

In the weeks leading up to the Testing in Context Conference Australia 2019, our thoughts turned to how we might sneak in a meetup event alongside the conference to make the most of the fact that Melbourne would be home to so many awesome testers at the same time.

Thanks to the conference venue – the Jasper Hotel – giving us use of one of our workshop rooms for an evening and also food & drink sponsorship by House of Test (Switzerland), the meetup became feasible and a bit of social media advertising coupled with a free Eventbrite campaign led to about twenty keen testers (including a number of TiCCA19 conference speakers) assembling at the Jasper on the evening of Thursday 28th February.

Some pre-meetup networking gave people the chance to make new friends as well as giving the conference speakers a chance to meet some of their fellow presenters. After I gave a very brief opening, it was time for the content to kick off in the shape of a presentation by well-known and respected Kiwi context-driven tester, Aaron Hodder. His talk was titled “Inclusive Collaboration – how our differences can make the difference” in which he explored how having a neurodiverse workforce can give you a competitive edge, and how the workplace can respect diverse needs and different requirements for interaction and collaboration to bring out the best in everyone’s differences. This was a beautifully-crafted talk, delivered with Aaron’s unique blend of personal connection to the topic and a smattering of self-deprecation, while still driving home a hard-hitting message. (Aaron also shared some great resources on Inclusive Collaboration at https://goo.gl/768M0u).

A short networking break then gave everyone the chance to mingle some more and clean up the remains of the food, before we kicked off the panel session. Ably facilitated by Rich Robinson, the panel consisted of four TiCCA19 speakers, in the shape of Graeme Harvey, Aaron Hodder, Sam Connelly and Ben Simo. The conversation was driven by a few questions from Rich: How have you seen the testing role change in your career? How do you think the testing role will change into the future? Is the manual testing role dead? The resulting 45-minute discussion between the panel and audience was engaging and interesting – and kudos to Rich for such a great job in running the panel.

We enjoyed putting this meetup on for the Melbourne testing community and the feedback from everyone involved was very positive, so thanks again to everyone who made it happen.