Many people slowed down in December, but I did not! I finished 2024 with a meetup in the city where these began: Berlin!
Marketing as the first step to Quality Assurance
When I helped Roman Evstigneev prepare his talk, I loved the idea of bringing a marketer’s perspective on quality assurance and encouraging engineers to improve their relations and communication with marketing teams — after all, quality is a team effort!
“Marketing helps us understand what people really need, while tech builds the product to solve those needs. Together, they create great products that truly help people.”
Roman raised the same topic I keep reiterating in my articles: the importance of collaboration between all the teams in assuring quality, and the negative effects of the information loss in cross-team communications.
Roman covered a topic that I continuously reiterate in my articles: the importance of cross-team collaboration and the negative impact of not prioritizing that collaboration. Quality assurance requires knowledge and information sharing, and you can’t effectively share information without great communication across all teams.
In his talk, Roman focused on the communication between marketing and IT teams. The audience loved it, especially Billy, the yellow chicken 😀
Quality assurance of… communications!
Veronika Ilina continued the discussion about how crucial good communication is at work. She presented an interactive session about pay raise negotiations. While the subject matter isn’t directly related to day-to-day QA duties, it is nevertheless extremely important for engineers at any stage of their career. Attendees were very involved in the session, demonstrating just how valuable this talk was to them (and how crucial it could be for other engineers.)
I find it marvelous that the QA principle of proactively investing time and effort into doing things right from the start applies to anything — from software development to salary negotiations.
When to Use Chaos Engineering: Exploring the Limits of Applicability
This was Aleksandr Ilin’s second talk on the topic of chaos engineering. In his first talk in October, he explained the principles of chaos engineering and shared his experience running the whole approach in a big company. After that well-received talk, he got a lot of questions about how to convince management to try the approach.
So for his second talk on this topic, he interviewed 8 teams from different companies. He asked the teams how they sold the idea to management, what problems they had in implementing it, and what the results were. At this meetup, more of the guests had experience with the chaos engineering approach, so there were a few discussions about tools like AWS Fault Injection Service and Netflix Chaos Monkey. I love to see more and more companies employing modern testing practices!
See you at a meetup in 2025!
Follow our Quality Engineering meetup pages to hear about upcoming meetups in Berlin and Amsterdam. We'll also be experimenting with new cities around Europe, follow us on Linkedin to be the first to hear about new locations.
