Review of our Quality Talks Meetup

It's quite common for us as Quality Assurance Engineers to hear the most obvious joke when we gather in the office for one of our brainstorming meetings.

Oh, that's a Quality meeting!

-- Funny colleague around

But that's exactly what we hosted on January 25th in our Lisbon office! A huge Quality Meetup!

We embraced the Quality community from Lisbon and abroad (the event was shared online too) and had an amazing evening connecting and sharing experiences and knowledge with an audience of +50 onsite and +20 online.

Where did this idea come from?

Actually, this is the second time we've hosted a Quality Talks Meetup. The last one was in the distant year of 2019. Yes, everything before the pandemic seems like it was ages ago. So, we wanted to "re-connect" with the community, share our knowledge and experiences, and contribute to leverage even more this sense of sharing, which is the beating heart of every community.

We've been leveraging this sense of brainstorming, connecting, and sharing internally within our QAs; we just needed to bring it to the outside. We have an amazing office, infrastructure, and support from Mercedes-Benz.io to be great hosts – so let's do it!

How was the process, and how did you select the topics?

We formed a taskforce to manage and organize the event. Karla, Joana, Camille, and I put our hands together to make it happen! We contacted Lina, founder of the Quality Talks Meetup community, and agreed from day one.

We had this sense from the beginning that we wanted to share knowledge and experience from our QA Engineers, so the topics would be around what we do or have done, providing a good insight for the community.

It would have been easy to choose a topic around AI - it's storming everywhere, and in Quality it's not an exception. But we opted to share something that we've been really experiencing in the last couple of months over some trendy and catchy topic that is still too fresh, even for us.

We challenged the QAs internally to suggest some topics based on this premise, and that's how we got the first topic: "Adapting CI/CD After Jenkins' Departure with Kubernetes-Powered Solutions: A Test Automation Odyssey." This was an odyssey told in the form of a short story by Margarida Costa, where she guided us into a journey of finding the best CI/CD fit for running her team’s test automation and her pitfalls during those discoveries. By the end of the presentation, we had a picture of how a tailored solution was the definite answer to her challenges.

In this presentation Margarida started by explaining the tool landscape we had before, with Jenkins being the center of our CI/CD process.

Then came the need for change and a new toolset being introduced, mainly GitHub Actions, and everything being shifted to GitHub. Margarida focused on what were the pitfalls and main struggles to get her test automation running in a sustainable way.

Lastly, Margarida shared her approach, based on ExpressJS and deployed on K8s cluster to overcome the challenges faced mainly with GitHub Runners availability.

From the beginning, we wanted to have an external speaker. In one of the first meetings about the Meetup, Joana came up with the idea of having Amanda Lacerda joining us. They had worked together in the past, and Amanda was now the CEO and Co-founder of QualityMap. We aligned with Amanda, and got our external presentation, and what a great one! An inspiring and very strong message about the Quality process, not only targeted for Quality Engineers but for companies.

Lastly, we wanted to close the ties with quick, hands-on presentation, with useful content for a QA Engineer on a day-to-day basis. Karla and I had been experimenting with some new tools lately, to bridge the gap on scenarios that we were facing, like lack of test data, missing configurations, etc. We joined forces for the last topic, which was to share our insights for Tweak and MITM Proxy.

This was done in a joint presentation, where Karla started to highlight the kinds of challenges these two tools can help solve. For example:

• Insufficient or limited test data
• External dependencies
• Simulation of extreme conditions

A little demo was shown on how Google Chrome can achieve this with the Override Content feature in a more simplistic way, followed by an explanation of the tweak extension benefits and limitations.

I then proceeded with the second half of the presentation, explaining what the MITM Proxy is and where the term is from. I also established the comparison between other tools, like:

• Proxyman
• Charles
• Postman Interceptor

After that, I highlighted the key features of the tool and how they can become handy to Quality Assurance Engineers in their day-to-day activities.

We finished our presentations by doing some live demos of the tools’ features and how they can be used to help QAs.

Main Takeaways

We finished the meetup with our hearts full of joy! The talks and presentations were amazing, with diverse topics ranging from Amanda’s powerful message to the usual Live demos that seemed to not want to work on the spot. The room was full, and it was very cool to engage and meet some other colleagues in the networking area after the presentations.

In the end, our main goal of sharing our excellence with the community, connecting, and contributing to it, was fully achieved.

The feedback from the audience was very positive, and we cannot wait to do it again!