Testing UY emerges in the year 2014 as a way to promote Testing in Uruguay and the region. The conference is 100% free and gathers groups of experts in different areas of knowledge, such as SQA, UI/UX, Management, among others. The main focus is, share experience, acquire new tools and have a great time. Each year, Testing UY offers a variety of talks, workshops, and lightning talks (15 minutes duration). Due to the pandemic, this year is the first year where the event is 100% remote, but the good spirit and collaboration have been the same as in previous editions. For this edition, Xmartlabs is a Bronze Sponsor.

Janet Gregory in the 2019 Testing UY edition.

Talks, Workshops, and Challenge

In this edition, Testing UY added a Challenge. It consisted in having a system under test for 24 hours, teams of three people had the task of delivering a PDF with the test report and use GitHub to report the encountered Bugs. 144 teams signed up for the Challenge, the first 100 teams will have the opportunity to be reviewed by the judges, and they will determine 3 winning teams. Those winner teams will access several prices and mentions, the results will be available by the end of August.

The system under test was provided by Abstracta, a channel via Discord was available during the event to ask questions to the Product Owner, and all the documentation was shared via Google Drive. We were able to perform Functional, Usability, and Accessibility testing while other testing techniques such as Performance (load, spike, soak) were not allowed due to the number of teams interacting with the system.

Our insight

Load your app with JMeter (Bruno Mareque & Delvis Echeverria): In this talk, an introduction to how to perform performance tests using the tool is presented, as well as the necessary configurations in the browser to be able to carry out the tests. Adding assertions and timers to be able to measure and then analyze the results. The best thing about this workshop is that problems that arose among the attendees were being solved when using the tool, which gave a realistic vision of problems that we can find when performing performance tests and how to interpret and solve them.

Accessibility Web Testing (Karen Amaro & Nicolás Marioni): It is important that accessibility talks be presented since nowadays from basic activities such as access to education or carrying out procedures require the use of applications and as people who work in IT, we must think inclusively so that all people have the same opportunity to access these. Taking good practices such as using semantically correct HTML tags or adding descriptions to images we are already making a difference in the user experience. At Xmartlabs, we share this vision and provide an end-to-end solution in Accessibility for our partners. Since we work with clients in Healthcare, taking under consideration every user it's as essential as accomplishing our clients' expectation regarding quality.

Design QA: quality from design perspective (Lucía Bustamante): In this presentation, she talked about including the UX designer when planning the application and monitoring it in the product's life cycle and having the ownership of then carrying out tests in a complementary work to that of the QA since it provides a different vision. When building a new system, the UX comes first along with quality, having the insight of a UX expert participating in Design Reviews is essential and therefore a must in the QA process.

Critical Thinking as a Testing Tool (Paula Castro):

Soft skills are essential (and many believe primordial) parts of SQAs. Good communication, critical thinking, adaptation to change are just some fundamental skills to have a standout performance in the area. Unlike other more technical workshops, this one had soft skills as its axis, and how these are fundamental for the job as an SQA and how to work on improving them.

Worthy of Mention

Smart Selectors: Machine learning for testing (Damián Pereira): SmartSelectors is an OSS project that combines testing and AI, during this talk the tool was presented as long as how was the journey of going live with it, the encountered issues, and how the speaker was able to sort them.

All the Talks, Workshops, and Lightning talks will be available on the Testing UY YouTube Channel.

Xmartlabs, a part of the community

We believe in sharing knowledge and contribute to the community. There are not many options to start acquiring technical skills to develop as SQA, therefore, our QA team created XL-School, the first two modules are live on our YouTube channel 100% free in Spanish content and more modules are yet to come to take you from 0 to 100 in no time.

Any thoughts? Which subjects do you believe we should include in the next modules? Leave us a comment and we will be happy to get back to you. We have an integral and dedicated team of Quality Engineers ready to partner and build awesome software together. You're interested? Let's talk!