SQA Days #18 – Speaking on the biggest Russian Test Conference

I spoke on SQA Days #17 in Belarus this year and I liked that conference. Feedback on my speech was positive so I decided to submit another call for next SQA in Moscow. Was quickly accepted so I was going to Moscow 🙂

My trip started 3:00 AM driving from Ostrava to Katowice Airport, then classic run between terminals in Frankfurt. Flight to Moscow was nice and I was really surprised by Lufthansa service on this flight (3 hours only) – very good meal, vine served several time, very friendly personal.

Immigration and security checks were quite strong in Moscow and it took more than 2 hours from landing to taxi. Moscow is big a city and it took 2 hours from Demedevovo Airport to city center. Traffic is quite big and fight for lines was really adrenaline.

My hotel was near to Red Square and about 15 minutes walk to the conference hall. I had very interesting discussion with several attendees over good local beer.

We were only four english-speaking speakers when our talks were translated simultaneously.

Alon Linetzki – Root Cause Analysis in Testing

Interesting talk about fixing problems instead of symptoms. I liked graphical model of “5 whys” approach = you need to ask “Why?” five times to find out the root cause. Than you need to find connection and links in the map.

I was some time lost in the presentation where was a lot of text and slides – quite too much for 40 minutes talk. Such slides are good as offline summary but I would rather see only the Map as background for the speech.

Alon Linetzki – Agile Implementation Challenges (Testing and more…)

Definitely more interesting presentation. Only 18 slides, mostly graphical, nice ideas.

We need to change the way we do things, we need to change the way we think and work
Going fast only with higher quality
People still needs to be part of the bigger group outside their cross functional teams
Manager often have problem with switch from quality to scope changes. But they like trade offs.
Every evening write down what new you learned. If nothing than you have to learn two things tomorrow.
Why are not black and white box testing balanced?
You cannot run away from Agile. You will need to do it sooner or later.

Bertrand Cornanguer – Quality Assurance vs. Quality Control, Future of Software Quality

Very interesting topic but the presentation was quite hard to follow. It looks like speech was prepared for longer period of time so presentation was very fast. Some slides were skipped and than I missed context of others.

Ideas I liked

Testers, what do we really want? Good product?
Most of the users prefers usability even if there are defects.
Preventing defects with low budget is hard
Agile is a dream often ending as nightmare
As a tester you should also propose solution, not only to point on problems

Ides I disagree with

“Improving the process to reach zero defect.” – Is this really our goal? My idea is about satisfied stakeholders and real delivered values. There will be always defects and it does not bother me.
“The Quality Engineers and Quality Department ensure the quality of the products.” – I am more on the side of cross-functional team where quality is shared responsibility.

Vojtěch Barta – Visualisation of Quality (Effective Reporting)

I tried to make it as practical as possible focusing on the “reason” why we prepare reports to challenge everybody to think about the “why part of the report” and what do they want to achieve by reporting.

There were a lot of questions after my talk and feedback from committee is also positive:

Hi Vojtěch,

thank you for your talk. He took 4th place (among 60+ talks) on the basis of audience sympathy. That is a very good result.

I am sure the next attempt is yours 🙂

If I get any feedback on your talk I will inform you about that. But, as a practice shows, participants do not like to write any feedbacks unfortunately.

I just can say that your talk was evaluated very high.

Mitko Mitev – Test Outsourcing in Eastern Europe

I was very surprised by this speech. I generally do not like outsourcing and I prefer collocated teams but it become harder and harder. I thought that the main motivation for outsourcing is cost savings. It looks I was wrong, partially

Cost saving are still important but there is huge mind shift when “Overcoming IT Talent shortage” is more and more important
There is no risk if we are all responsible people
India has no creativity but they have discipline. Europe is sometimes too much creative and discipline is problem.
Infrastructure is very important aspect of outsourcing.
It is expected that by the end 2015 top six EU markets alone will need 250 000 extra employees with IT skills, and this does not cover the rapidly and instantly expanding US job market.
Testing budget allocation is increasing.

Following talks were in Russian but I had a lot of one-on-one discussions whole afternoon and there was very nice afterparty with concert.

Saturday was about sightseeing in Moscow. It is very interesting city, bit pessimistic and depressive for me. They often do not speak English so a bit challenging. Thank you Natasha for guidance.