We love meetups and working with local European communities!
This spring we had two Quality Engineering meetups in Berlin, Germany: in March and in May, and now we’ve just had one in Helsinki, Finland!
We collaborated with Zalando to host three talks:
- How to run successful software without QA by Ekaterina Volkova, Zalando
- Educational insights for QA: From Finnish educational system to mob learning by myself, Vitaly Sharovatov, Qase
- Social Software Testing Approaches by Maaret Pyhäjärvi, CGI
Highlights from this Quality Engineering Meetup in Helsinki
How to run successful software without QA
Ekaterina Volkova gave her talk on her experience in assuring quality in the Zalando Lounge product without dedicated QAs in the development team.
“Transition to no-QA model can be hard, a strong culture of quality is needed, and so is training for engineers”
I see this trend in some companies where QAs transition from their traditional role and become Quality Assistants, helping dev teams learn how to assure and control quality in the products they build. There is some rationale to this, after all, quality is better assured than controlled, right?
Educational insights for QA: From Finnish educational system to mob learning
I gave a talk about the modern educational sciences perspective on QA and development and how benefits from pair and mob programming support learning in conditions of higher uncertainty.
“Solo work is good for work with low uncertainty, like well-scripted tasks where there’s little learning. For everything else, you might consider pairing or mobbing.”
Social Software Testing Approaches
Maaret Pyhäjärvi presented her talk on how understanding the social nature of our collaboration leads to better testing and learning.
“Pairing and ensemble (mob) testing are learning oriented, where results follow”
This is a great insight, and this is exactly what I believe the approach should be. When we focus on learning, outcomes emerge as by-products, but when we focus on outcomes, learning is always limited. This is what differentiates successful quality circles from those which didn’t help Ford at all. It was so surprising and cool to hear Maaret promoting social work approaches which are quite similar to what I believe are the most effective.
Unfortunately, we ran into technical issues with Maaret's video, so we are including her slides below.
Join us at a meetup!
We will continue hosting our meetups in Europe. If you wish to be notified about these events, kindly subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on Linkedin (or both 🙂)
