I Congreso Argentino de Testing is the very first Argentine Congress on Testing. Speakers from different provinces throughout Argentina gathered to share knowledge and discuss issues of interest to a growing community of testers. The event was held October 18, 2016. I was there, and I’m here now to share with you what I learned.
Who Was There?
The conference drew a large group of testers from different parts of the country. There were also international speakers who spoke on a good variety of topics. The event was streamed live from the UTN (National Technological University), so in addition to those attending in person, there was a wide, global audience following the event online.
The Speaker Presentations
Some of the most exciting highlights of the event were the so-called “metatech talks”. These presentations focused upon topics like testing strategies and trends in the testing world. Speakers highlighted key points such as:
- Testing activity is developing rapidly – even more so than we may realize!
- The presence of testing is growing, not just in the process itself, but also in the budget of software development projects.
The data for these trends were taken from ISTQB surveys, which queried certified testers from around the word. ISTQB offers many different levels of certifications for testers around the world, I had the pleasure to be part of this survey since I’m certified by this institution. The surveyed testers hailed from many different companies operating in various sectors of business and across diverse markets. For me, the diversity of the surveyed people lent added credibility to the presentations.
Trends in Testing
And what were the trends we learned about? For starters, we can see that 70% of assessed companies expend between the 11% and 40% of their budgets in testing activities.
If we look at how the testing budget is allocated, in 2015 and 2016, we can say that:
- 33% is invested in Tools (Software and Licences)
- Another 33% in Hardware and Infrastructure
- The final 34% in Human resources
Other Trends Highlighted at the Conference
Here’s a quick run-down of some other highlights I thought were especially fascinating:
- UX testing has grown substantially along with performance and security testing.
- Another interesting metric is that the percentage of testing “In House” was reduced from 51% to 30% between 2012 and 2015. That means that companies are “Sharing” testing responsibilities with different partners.
There are others surveys from others institutions a well. Numbers are not exactly the same, but they are really close to the ones that I just mentioned.
Technical Presentations
Other speakers gave presentations that were more technical, like performance testing, and mobile testing. And of course there was a talk dedicated to UX testing, which is an important task before releasing your app to the market.
There was also a talk about “Agile testing” which turned out to be particularly productive for me, since I came away with various helpful tips on ways to keep improving the process here at Making Sense.
Here are what I consider to be the most helpful takeaways from the presentation on Agile testing:
- You shouldn’t test the same area for more than 2 hours if you did not find a bug.
- You should write a test case when you find a bug and add it to your test case suit.
- You should keep your focus on what you are testing. It is common to find a possible problem in a different flow while you are testing a particular flow of the app. If this happens, you should keep focusing on your main flow, because there will be time to test the other one later :)
Conclusion
I Congreso Argentino de Testing provided a platform for the testing community to share knowledge and experience with the entire community. For me, it was an amazing experience to be able to do that. During my time at the conference it became very clear to me how fast this area is growing, and how testing activities are now a crucial phase of the software testing life cycle.
Personally, I believe that this was a positive experience because it allowed me to realize how advanced we are at Making Sense with the QA process. In general it was a very productive day and we are looking forward to being part of the second edition next year.
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