On Tuesday, June 7, a meeting of the Tricity IT community organized by Infoshare took place. The topic of the 89th meetup were tests. I’ve decided to visit it and check how the local industry integrates and inspires each other. 

The event was held in coworking space O4 in the business surroundings of the Olivia Business Center buildings in Gdańsk. It was divided into several parts – the agenda included a large portion of practical, essential knowledge, as well as entertainment and networking. 

The attendance was really high. Among the audience there were testers, data analysts, managers and programmers. I met some of my colleagues from previous workplaces, who directed their career path towards testing.

The event started just after 5 p.m. with a speech given by Robert Oleskiewicz, entitled ‘Building an effective strategy in restrictive processes – race against time, standards and excursions’. The presentation aroused a lot of interest, not only because of the speaker’s charisma and his good contact with the audience, but also the practical side of the content. The speaker referred to his own experiences and challenges that his testing team faces on a daily basis, including:

• creating a consistent specification, 
• requirements analysis, reviews and revisions, 
• changes causing slowdowns and test restarts, 
• late testing (due to waiting for full functionality),
• omnipresent time pressure, 
• time-consuming – but necessary – risk analysis, 
• bugfix and accompanying regressions.  

The second lecture – ‘The right direction of accessibility testing’ belonged to Bartłomiej Bugajny. It gave a lot of food for thought due to the social dimension – the subject of consideration was the accessibility of various solutions for people affected by different kinds of disability. From the presentation you could find out:

• what accessibility really means and why it is so important,
• how to easily translate WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines),
• what are the expectations towards accessibility tests,
• what are the costs of such tests,
• how to use widely available tools in practice. 

The last, third presentation was devoted to the Selenium 4 tool. The speaker – Jakub Patynko with a lot of humor explained what is new in the latest version of Selenium – an automated testing platform for web applications. He used both his professional knowledge and his personal interests to present:

– what’s new:

• relative locators,
• upgraded Selenium IDE,
• upgraded Selenium Grid,
• Chrome DevTools Protocol,
• changes in Firefox support,
• improved Window/Tab management,
• new methods and changes in the ActionClass,

– what became deprecated:

• desired capabilities,
• FindsBy() Method,

– how migration to Selenium 4 works.

Each of the 3 companies, which were partners of the event (and had their own speaker), was present with a stand and a representation of employees, willing to answer questions from the participants – e.g those related to their current recruitment processes. There were also competitions with prizes in kind at the stands. 

In this edition of camps, the regular networking part was replaced by an after party, taking place on the patio of the O4 coworking space. The atmosphere was conducive to informal conversations – held on deckchairs, under a palm tree, surrounded by food trucks, and to the sounds of music played by DJs. Guests could try a beer, play on slot machines, as well as take part in competitions. In the first one, carried out with the help of Kahoot, the winners were people with not only testing background, but also general knowledge from the technology area. The second contest was a variation of bingo – to win you needed reflex, but also openness and networking skills. One of the most desired prizes to win in the contest was a ticket to the biggest tech conference in CEE – the Infoshare to be held in October 2022.

In my opinion, the success of the event is demonstrated not only by the high level of presentations and numerous discussions with presenters and audience members, but also by the fact that the rainy weather did not disturb the continuation of the meeting 🙂

The atmosphere was very pleasant – even people who, like me, for the first time participated in such a meetup, could feel comfortable. The openness of the community was noticeable! 

Therefore, I encourage everyone to appear at the next meeting, scheduled for the end of August and dedicated to Java (which, by the way, is the most common theme of Tech3camps).

It is worth getting inspired in such friendly conditions! And who knows – maybe at the next event we will appear not only as an audience ;)?