VodQa Meetup Pune

The Saturday before this note, I went with teammates from TinyOwl to a VodQA workshop at ThoughtWorks Pune. VodQA, as they put it, is a value-oriented discussion on quality analysis: a room for anyone who wants to learn and argue about QA, not only people with quality in the job title. The theme this time was agile testing practices. The plan had already been posted in the Facebook group.

It was our first visit to ThoughtWorks Pune and to VodQA. We left Mumbai early, reached the venue before the start, and used the spare time to compare problems with other people in the hall. After registration, breakfast, and the keynote, the room was about a hundred people or more: QA, developers, specialists, and product managers.

Hands-on

The first exercise was an agile game. Teams of eight, plus a product owner. The product was a balloon with a pattern drawn on it, and the job was to deliver replicas that matched. Each iteration taught something, and the delivery got better because the process changed, not because anyone tried harder in the same process. After the game there was a talk on agile testing practices and the usual failures.

The second exercise was a conversation between a QA, a product manager, and a team. The product manager kept handing the QA a task. One of them was to test a ball with no requirements, then again once a few assumptions were allowed. The debrief was communication: peers, stakeholders, and managers, under an agile setup. Both exercises were simple and sharper than they looked.

Talks

ThoughtWorks pairs on code, and this day they paired on talks as well. One talk was about testing with a global team. A couple more were test automation, patterns and practices, from past projects, with a mobile UI suite as the example. Anand spoke on test automation patterns: the quality of the test code itself, how to keep it, and the problems that show up once a framework is large.

Afterwards

The day worked. The activities held, and so did lunch. If a later event at ThoughtWorks Pune looks useful, it is worth the trip, and worth offering to contribute. We hoped to do that at a later VodQA.

On the way back we had new people to write to, a few problems we had traded solutions for, and a check that our own practices were in the same conversation as ThoughtWorks. The original note pointed people at the event presentations.

The four of us in the team photo were Hemant, Ulhas, me, and Jitendra. It was the first official Saturday off from TinyOwl, which is part of why the train home felt short.