Thanks to the unremitting efforts of Odd-Arne Bjørklund (@bjorklo) it has now been held no less that six TestPubs in Oslo over the last year. It seems like the crowd is growing steadily and this time the topic was Mobile Test Automation. Although it had very little to do with automating testing while on the move, it was a nice little intro to matters concerning phones and other devices.
According to Meetup.com there were 31 attendees. I’m not a hundred percent sure it was that many, but it was a new record and a pretty good crowd. The meetup was in the offices of Knowit‘s Oslo branch, and they were awesome enough to sponsor pizzas and beverages to the masses. this was indeed very nice of them and a good way to build rapport with the local test community. I am quite sure Odd-Arne is happy to let Knowit and any other interested parties repeat the success, so ping him and get in line!
The topic of the evening was as mentioned “Mobile Test Automation”, and a presentation was held by Rajkumar Rajangam, the test automation lead professional at Knowit. It was an overview of challenges concerning development and deployment of mobile applications and how this affects the need for testing. It was not much “what to test and how to test it”, but apparently the presentation was based on one held at upper management level where too much details and technical stuff perhaps would have been out-of-place. Instead it focused more on the “why”. Fair enough, but not exactly groundbreaking.
After a little break, to make another attempt at finishing off the pizzas, Raj gave an overview of some test tools and a live demo of some of them. It was sort of interesting in a general kind of way, it’s always cool to hear about other kinds of testing. Testing mobile devices is not my area of expertise but some attendees seemed very interesting in details of some of the tools so I guess it hit closer to home there.
After the presentation its was time for beers at Amundsen Bryggeri & Spiseri. Five(of 31!) brave testers left for the pub and was later joined by five people from Knowit. I guess they had to do the dishes before joining us. It was their meeting room that had been turned into a pizza parlor after all. Despite the low number of people showing up at the pub it was some nice discussions and a bit of networking. One of the oddest things of the evening (for me anyway) was when we realized one of the other guys is actually my neighbor. Small world indeed!
There was some talk about the possibility of developing the testpubs a bit more. Obviously there are more and more people hearing about it and coming to the meetings, so Odd-Arne has done a great job getting the ball rolling. I think it was him that first mentioned perhaps having pubs more often, and we briefly discussed including lightning talks, getting “regular attendees” to do shorter or longer presentations based on everyday experiences. This could be a recent success story, or some problem the presenter would like some advice on. There were several good ideas and a lot of nodding and agreeing, so we will see what this can become. It certainly looks like there are people willing and interested to join Odd-Arne pulling the weight.
It was also suggested that maybe even a full day thingy could be possible at some point. Is there a NEWT coming up? (for reference see LEWT, DEWT, MEWT, SWET)
The next meetup is loosely scheduled for “after the summer”. Interesting times ahead for sure!
A summary of the evening, and the slides from the presentation, is also available at Knowit’s testing blog Kvalitetsentusiastene (summary in Norwegian, slides in English).
+1 Testing 