Key Takeaways from NSTC’22, London

NSTC is an annual conference for all things software testing and all testers to gather for few interesting sessions around automation, best practices, manual testing, challenges in daily software testing, workshops and what not. It’s a 2 day paid event and it was hosted in the Millenium Gloucester Hotel near the Gloucester Road station in the Central London. It happened on 8th & 9th of month of June in 2022. Visit https://www.softwaretestingnews.co.uk for more info.

Pointers:

NSTC — National Software Testing Conference, AWS — Amazon WorkSpace, VPC — Virtual Private Cloud, UAT — User Acceptance Testing, CI/CD — Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, *** — Interesting Session, ** — Interesting but arguable, * — Sales Pitch

The thrilling event kickstarted with registrations in the Sentosa suite of the hotel, followed by tea/coffee in the main hall with booths by various organisations all over the place. All the sessions were arranged to happen in orchards 1 and 2, 2 floors below where we all were. And of course the workshops in the right most room after you exit the lift.

The 1st keynote of the event about “You cannot expect success if you plan for failure” by Daryl Elfield from KPMG was about 6 ways one can take control of their career. He was an experienced partner and a fun speaker. He talked more about how being mindful of your words and actions and doing the right things always helps growing rightly in your career. For example, let me mark what I noted and liked most from his slides, applying same quality criteria as we do for requirements and in that how it has to be Clear, Correct, Complete, Traceable, Consistent, Unambiguous

In the last part, he talked about “Taking pride in your work”. He then continued by sharing some tips and tricks that can turn around your own perception to improve product quality and your own sense of self worth.

After a little recess of 15 minutes, the 1st session “Demystifying Artificial Intelligence for Software Testing” by Priya Kumar from Aristocrat Technology Inc was arranged in Orchard 2. She focused on uncovering few myths around how AI can help discover early defects in the lifecycle, provide optimised recommendations etc,. and help the team.

The next one was a “Banking in the Cloud and the role of Digital Assurance” by Simon Dawson and Shiva Prasad from the Atom Bank and Cigniti software respectively. Shiva mentioned about how they consistently work towards improving expertise from the current growing market and help enhancing customer experience of the UK’s 1st all virtual bank.

He put some light on how they run regression suites for 2800 test cases in the CI/CD and how they plan to bring the run time to just a day. That will be huge, isn’t it?

James Bent from Virtuoso demoed a less/no code automation using their tool and making QA life easy, in his session “In-sprint test automation: what bottleneck?”. He focused on how a QA’s life is happy in the beginning of the sprint and how it all adds up to a bottleneck by the end of it. All the coding involved in his demo was mostly plain English, for eg: ‘Click Accept Cookies’.

“The Dark Arts of UAT” by Bill Watson from BBC was about not manual, not automation but how not doing UAT can lead projects to disasters. He walked through a slide which explained the gap between what a customer puts forth as a requirement, how the BA perceives it, how the developer develops it, how the QA tests it and in the end what actually is delivered. This historically has proven to be taken care with the help of UAT and has been helping till date.

“The Art of Testing Yourself”*** by Al Lines from Moody’s Investor Service, UK was about: In the IT world we normally focus on validating and testing ephemeral things — software. How does it work if instead we focus on the hardware — ourselves. Do we often challenge and test ourselves? Can be become better QA’s from doing so?

He did not mention of any failures of major successes, neither pointed at just the Software Industry but Testing in itself. The presentation delivery and engagement: 10/10.

End of Day 1 was a panel discussion among Arun Agarwal who is a CIO at Industrial Enterprises and flew in from Helsinki, Gaurav Mathur COO at Headspin, Vijay Vadivel Head of QA at News UK, Glyn Martin Head of Test at NTT Data UK and not to forget: the Audience. The topic was “The challenges and approaches of perfecting Digital Experience through Testing”.

The luck of everyone present was checked thrice by end of day when Cigniti began with their draw and the 1st three draws, the winners had already left for the day. For the 4th draw, the winner was called in from a different room. The guy with the yellow shirt in the middle won the Apple AirPods. To my hard luck.

And finally as per the schedule, Time for some drinks! #cheers

Day 2 started with a keynote by a duo from Dunelm who spoke about “Quality Engineering — growing a career beyond Testing”. People at Dunelm have put together or designed a career path for people to take learnings in and around Software Testing.

Followingly, some heavy brainstorming workshop on “Performance Testing of Serverless architecture in Cloud (AWS)”*** by Krishnan Shukla from Aryeet where he demonstrated hitting APIs of a AWS VPC using docker containers, which technically is the only way to communicate the VPCs as its a private network created virtually by AWS. And then calling the lambda functions, varying as per your purpose. Staring point of all this is a jMeter jmx file which specifies the load to be generated and other parameters like user credentials, no.of simultaneous users etc,. Interesting.

Session Cancelled.

“To code or not to code? That is the question!”* was a session about useMango, a windows based desktop tool making the QA life easy, obviously less code. The speaker Paramjit Singh walked the audience through a recorded demo of the tool and how just few clicks enabled the user to login to wordpress.

The session “Testing Marvels in the EAM World” had a cinematic experience attached to it. The speaker Sabitha Nalli from the Peacock Engineering Ltd had couple of YT videos to show how Agile entered as a superhero and made delivery and life easy for teams. She talked all about the product, didn’t reveal the name as it’s a yet to release and pondered upon how starting a project with unclear requirements, lack of expertise in automation etc,. impacted the business and the team ended up losing a year of time and the release delayed.

They shouldn’t have kick started in the first place with unclear requirements I would say but sometimes we really get into the character and in the rush of achieving something before time, we end up screwing up badly and cost ourselves too much.

Session Cancelled

Steve began with an interesting story of his wife who was not one of us, not from the IT and always struggled with using the technology and as was the session about: “Going Beyond Functional Testing: Automated Rapid UX Testing and Analysis”***, it really matters to us to what we deliver for the end customers to use or consume. He later added that she started with opening a X bank account online sitting at home and the following week they receive a joining kit of a Y bank. When Steve asked his wife about it, she simply stated that the website was not too good and wouldn’t load easily and so she went on signing up with this new bank. Isn’t this how we lose customers? Absolutely. Always, the presentation of the product equally matters as the product itself. You might have a free bank account opening but if my experience is not good I wouldn’t mind paying a few bucks for good experience with some other service provider.

He progressed with the session explaining how Headspin gathered and helped solve modern day problems faced by customers from time to time.

2nd one post lunch on day 2 was about “Visual Testing Explained”* by Andy Wyatt from Sauce Labs. 2nd session from this speaker on the day 2. Visual things are equally important as functional things he quoted walking through a few visual blunders by few big orgs like Apple making user life a nightmare. Flutter is a canvas based technology, emerging web design trend these days. Selenium with the getText() method is going to get the text which is actually missing in the UI. This can only be caught by Visual Testing. Many Open source tools compare pixel to pixel, for eg: SwagLabs. Chrome has a babit of changing the rendering engine between major versions. Same version of your tool might be rendered differently leading into a bug. Point!

Few advantages of visual testing: Increase coverage, parallel execution, improvements to visual quality. Sauce Visual is the Sauce Labs project around Visual testing with a technology called “Smart Hybrid Diff”, is a cloud provider agnostic, mobile supported tool. They’re currently onboarding themselves to GCP.

“Is Manual Testing Dead?”** by Jonathan Daniel from ADP. 1st time speaker at a conference. No was the answer of the speaker for the question in title. Clearly. 25% of testing in KPMG is manual. 1 in every 4 positions on the market today for QAs is for Manual QA. “If everybody owns something, nobody actually owns it.” he quoted. He was referring to quality here, weirdly. Manual exploratory testing reduced defects in production by 50%. This was done by being inclusive. Associates from payroll were introduced to being testers and testers were given a new role of being an end user. It helps sometimes. NPS has improved. Achievement is as appealing and equal to automated testing.

Some fun on the booths in between. Some huge Jenga was in place by the Cigniti in front of their booth for volunteers to display some talent. This was the tallest one managed by someone from Cigniti itself.

Day 2 ended with an energetic and fun keynote by Kirutika Ganesan aka KiKa from Deko about “The power of Example Mapping”. She had few interactive slides and a short video from YT about how following example mapping can help reduce gaps in understanding and how participation from all team members and not just the Product Owner or the Delivery Manager to bring the stories and epics to the table might make the whole team further productive. Sensibly, she’s right, we mostly consume what the PO has to offer and accept the backlog and the technical debt without right questions asked.

She continued further emphasising on how multiple examples of specific cases convey information better that a single bad abstraction of a concept. She explained how story mapping is different and how it’s scope is limited to the story level and example mapping is done at epic level with all stories inclusive.

Lastly, but not the least, thank you Which? for sponsoring us to attend the event. I’m sure each of us have a bunch of learnings from the same and will definitely help us in our routine QA jobs.

Team Which?

Little Feedback for the Organisers:

1. Approximately 8 to 10 sessions were cancelled due to no show by the speakers, perhaps due to valid reasons but the attendees are working professionals too. If a session is of 20 mins and a group of 20 people plan on attending it, so it’s a waste of 400 mins altogether.
2. The session were planned in a Tracks method, so 3 session were running in parallel. You’ve to miss 2 others to attend 1. Big compromise. Also I know it gets tougher fitting so many sessions in a 2 day event and I’m being selfish here thinking of just making most of my time. :)