The Future of QE Envisioned at QuaNTA 2019 | Pune – India

On the path to transforming organizations in every aspect by utilizing the latest technologies in the digital and cognitive field, Globant successfully introduced the NXT series of premier tech conferences in 2018. Raising the bar this year, Team Globant on the first weekend of June, rolled-out QuaNTA NXT – A conference that focused on quality assurance and new-age technologies. What started in March 2018 as a leading conference (and proved itself as one in the first year of inception itself) with a focus on new technologies in QA, clearly established itself as a market leader and “the conference to beat” in the QA space in its second avatar!
Team Globant, living up to its image of a digitally native company, ensured the participants were greeted at the Globant Pune facility with QR code scanners to facilitate a seamless, digital registration process (the unique QR codes we sent to each attendee on their respective emails). Shivraj Sabale, VP of Technology at Globant set the tone for the conference and in his brief talk covered various topics including why it is important to learn and earn AI techniques, how continuous development of Quality Engineers is possible and how they could prevent from getting irrelevant in the market. Shivraj emphasized on how digitalization has changed music, how the businesses and sale patterns have changed after the emergence of AI. He further encouraged Quality Engineers to become solution providers and to break out of their comfort zones and learn new and upcoming technologies that unravel ones worth and potential.
Post Shivraj’s keynote, Anand Bagmar, a Software Quality Evangelist with an experience of over 20 years in the software testing sphere took center stage to speak on the finer nuances of the Test Automation Pyramid. His talk of close to an hour focussed on how to add value to a product leveraging automation, how CICD is essential to automate every reusable test plan and how UI and UX should be the least focussed area in testing. Anand stressed on why the focus should be on highly impacting tests and that a product built once should be persistent in performance and presentation. Furthermore, Anand mentioned as to how Visual validation is missing in an Automation Tester’s approach today and how challenges like Snapshot testing what is a false positive or negative, baseline maintenance, result analysis and maintenance could be overcome. Anand’s impressive session ended with the demonstration of the Applitools application.
Next up was Vishal Bhalerao, Associate Partner at Sahaj Software Solutions Inc., who spoke on how the Tester is being lost in transition today. He covered topics focussing on the difference between Manual and Automation testing and why is manual QA looked down upon. He stressed on what motivates a TAE performing manual testing and how instead of blindly leaning towards automation, how a better understanding would build a better product. Vishal further mentioned as to why aspiring automation testers should actually focus on end to end scenarios and not only on granular test cases, and how exploratory testing does not mean ad-hoc testing. Evangelizing the future of automation testing he did mention as to how Agile as a process is required to focus on the velocity of a project.
Post a quick Tea break, Karun Japhet, Solution Consultant at Sahaj Software Solutions Inc. spoke on how do you build horizontally scalable asynchronous event-driven microservices platforms and release functionality to production every week without issues. He focussed on the most imp part of testing – unit tests, gave examples of the payment lifecycle and mentioned the example of Google to lay emphasis on writing consumer-driven contract tests. Post Karun’s insightful session, Fanil Sutarwala, Test Automation Engineer at Globant stressed on what needs to be learned to StayRelevant in today’s era of cut-throat competition.
A quick working lunch ushered in the Panel Discussion that discussed an absolutely relevant question that a lot of QA professionals have – The Future of Manual QA’s. Deepak Koul, TAE Head at Red Hat, Gaurav Mahajan, TAE Head at Contentserv, Ketan Joshi, VP at Deustche Bank and Anagha Pawar, TD of QE at Globant India discussed various points including the ever intriguing topic – Manual Vs Automation testing and why is manual testing looked down upon. The discussion also shed insights on topics including what motivates a Test Automation Engineer to perform manual testing, how Agile doesn’t expect you to play with planning, what are the relevant technologies that a QA professional can learn more than Automation, how it is crucial to change perception to become user-centric, how automation tools are helpful to new automation testers and most importantly why manual QA at all if automation covers so much ground. The panel discussion was followed by the sharing of success stories by Globant’s very own Rasika Subhedar and Muzfera Naaz.
The last speaker for the day was Mukund Wangikar, Director, Xpanxion – A UST Global Company who focussed on Scriptless Automation. Mukund stated facts that the core craft should not die just because automation is up and that Agile actually made testers fragile. Furthermore, he stressed the importance of coding without learning any programming language with a lot of reusable scripts, how the test automation time could be reduced, as compared to Selenium. Mukund discussed the features of the model-based approach too and also laid focus on various Testing tools for DevOps. The conference concluded with some quizzes, fun activities and a networking session.
Overall, with QuaNTA NXT 2019, Globant did take it’s conferences to the next level. Features like QR codes and audience interaction tools like Slido were introduced to bring about a seamless digital experience. We are sure that the participants left enriched with a lot of information on the QA sphere.