Speakers

Andrei Tognolo

TransferWise | UK

BIO: Andrei is an idealist who seeks to transform utopia into reality. He’s currently the Tech Lead of the Engineering Experience team at TransferWise. With over 13 years of experience, he has worked mainly for companies focused on agile methodologies and quality, like Dextra Sistemas and ThoughtWorks.

TALK: Tests at TransferWise: Challenges to test a system with more than 300 services

For decades we have been evolving strategies to test monolithic systems. The importance of concepts like the test pyramid was iterated over and over again. However, with the growing adoption of microservices, there’s a need to revisit these practices to adapt them to the complexity brought by distributed systems.

Based on the journey to migrate from a monolith to a microservice architecture at TransferWise, this talk intends to discuss the challenges faced while testing a system with more than 300 services and over 100 daily deployments. We will talk about techniques that we have been using, like Monitoring, Feature Toggles, Canary Releases, Contract Testing, and Testing in Production. We will also analyze why enterprise-wide staging environments are obsolete and possible alternatives, like on-demand testing environments.

Marcin Sikorski

Poland

BIO: Public speaker (f.e. TEDx, seeTest), writer, tester, influencer, mentor. Specialist of Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 working in IT since 2013. Author of the book “Real IT World – Internet of Things”. Advisor for Polish government (IoT department) & CPK in the area of where the IoT can be implemented in Poland and how exactly this can be achieved. Currently working with smart solutions for nuclear power plants. Member of Poland Hong Kong Business Association and SJSI who after hours teaches companies how to understand smart transformation and Chinese culture.

TALK: IoT connects the world but not the people (except lawyers)

Discussions about IoT technology and next-generation smart devices focus solely on the financial and technological aspects of proposed solutions. As much as desire and willingness of creators is noble, the language used to describe those technologies is very inconsistent, chaotic and unstable resulting in defining the same concepts in multiple, often contradictory ways. Moreover, due to the materialistic nature of technology itself, such topics as trustworthiness for smart devices, ethical aspects of using tech, security concerns and mitigations are not touched often enough, and this results in a general public doubt. Consumers do not sympathize with IoT describing it as an extremely unstable, hard to understand concept.

I analyze the root cause of this problem and address impending societal paradox in which we are connecting smart devices in a more efficient way than ever before but at the same time we are distancing people. The only remaining one who are most satisfied with this chaotic situation are lawyers which benefit most from this chaos. Let’s propose solutions and suggest possible ways to overcome the difficult situation in which modern IoT found itself in.

Keynote: Anne-Marie Charrett

BIO: Anne-Marie Charrett makes quality visible in a language that a business can understand. As co-Founder of Testing Times, she excels at creating spaces where a quality infected culture can thrive. With 20 years experience in software delivery with roles ranging from testing software protocols, to Quality Engineering Consultant to Head of Engineering at Tyro Payments, Anne-Marie’s knowledge and skill has been truly tested.

You can read more about her ideas on her blog (http://mavericktester.com) and catch some of her thoughts on twitter at @charrett.

Nick Stenning

Microsoft/Azure | Germany

TALK: Learning from incidents: understanding how things went right

When things go wrong, we tend to focus on mistakes, miscalculations, and deficiencies in design. By limiting our investigations to the details of what went wrong, we ignore a far richer and more interesting source of learning: how things went right.

Research across numerous safety-critical industries such as aviation and medicine is changing what we know about how to build systems and organizations which are resilient to failure. We will look into the findings of that research and discover how we can avoid falling into common traps of investigation which curtail our ability to learn. This research shows us that the best results come when we are able to answer questions such as:

• How does the system normally work?
• How did we recover?
• How do teams adapt to surprising circumstances?
• Where did we get lucky, and what worse outcomes did we avoid?

We will share stories from beyond the boundaries of our own industry in order to show how powerful some of these new investigative techniques can be. We will move beyond a shallow analysis of root causes and remediation items in an effort to build truly resilient engineered systems for the future. You’ll leave this talk with some simple and practical steps you can take in your own team to help you learn not only “what went wrong?” but also “what went right?”

Mesut Durukal

Siemens | Turkey

BIO: Mesut Durukal is QA & Test Automation Manager at Siemens. He has a Bs & MsC degree from Boğaziçi University Electrical & Electronic Engineering. He has a 7 years’ experience in Defense Industry, working in MultiLocation projects serving as the Manager of Verification & Validation activities. He has then been working in Agile Software Testing projects for more than 2 years. He is acting as a Product Owner & E2E Test Automation Leader for the QA team.

TALK: Future of Software Testing: Artificial Intelligence Assistance

Nowadays, researches are looking for adaptation of Machine Learning algorithms to testing processes to reduce the manual effort and improve quality. In this talk, we will discuss in detail Machine Learning practices with a case study.

We start with a quick view of the machine learning types. Then, we list AI applications in testing these perspectives: test definition, implementation, execution, maintenance and grouping, and bug handling. What’s more, we do not only present existing AI applications but also what can be done in the future. Finally, we summarize the application areas with algorithms and discuss the advantages and potential risks of AI applications in software testing.

Stages in which AI is applied are:

• Test definition
  – Implementation
•  Automatic code generation
• Code completion
  – Execution: exploratory testing
  – Maintenance and grouping
• Review test code
• Heal broken test code
• Prioritize test cases
• Constructing suites
  – Bug Management
• Triage
• Classification
• Assignment

Aleksandra Kunysz

Szkoła testów | Poland

BIO: Ola Kunysz is a software engineer who spreads knowledge about tests and quality among programmers. She gained her experience in various projects in Europe and the United States. She likes to talk to people and learn difficult answers to simple questions.

When it’s time to relax, she’s offline [with dog(s), playing board games, in the mountains].

Rafał Borowiec

AirHelp | Poland

BIO: An IT specialist specializing in software development, software testing and quality assurance, project management, and team leadership.

Rafał is currently holding a position of a Software Engineering Manager at AirHelp, where he is mainly responsible for building and managing teams of professional developers and testers.

He believes in Agile project management and he’s a big fan of technology, especially technology that is Java related (but not limited to it). He loves sharing knowledge about software development and practices through this blog but also during workshops and trainings.

Michał Kujałowicz

Spartez | Poland

BIO: In the software development field since 2005. From 2011 working at Spartez (partner of Atlassian). He started his career as Tester, then Test Manager, Quality Assistant, QA Team Lead and Quality Engineering Manager. Since 2018 Michal is Development Manager, with an organization consisting of over 40 Engineers.

For the last 5 years co-organizer of regular local testing community meetings – TrójQA. Academical teacher at post-graduate studies in Software Testing. Presenter at Software Engineering conferences and meet-ups in Poland. In 2017 and 2018 had the honor to be co-chair of the Agile & Automation Days conference.

Michal’s passion is around growing leaders and skills required to be one as well as teaching how to grow soft skills.

Keynote: Bas Dijkstra

BIO: Bas is an independent test automation trainer and consultant who takes pride in helping teams and organizations improve their testing efforts through smart application of tools. He consults with clients to help them take their first or their next step in test automation, or to help them get unstuck when they feel that their current test automation doesn’t provide the value it could.

Bas is an experienced trainer on various subjects related to testing and automation, delivering workshops and courses in house with clients and at conferences both in the Netherlands and abroad on a regular basis.

Bas lives in the Netherlands with his wife and two sons and when he is not working he likes to run or to read a good book (particularly British detective novels).

You can contact him at bas@ontestautomation.com or on LinkedIn.

Kasia Balcerzak

Dynatrace | Poland

BIO: A trained archaeologist who nowadays specializes in discovering of legacy systems. Kasia is currently a Software Engineer at Dynatrace, where she takes care of shared infrastructure and tooling the organization needs. Wherever Kasia can get involved in quality and testing you will see her there. Every day looking to learn something new. Improves to help others as a speaker and a trainer.

Ioana Finaru Porcarasu

Wealth Wizards | United Kingdom

BIO: Lead QA Engineer at Wealth Wizards UK, focusing on quality within a range of finTech products whilst being an evangelist of continuous delivery and use of automation. Working as an Automation in Test Engineer for the past 8 years, my main focus is to shift test as left as possible, to work closely with the stakeholders to create smarter automated checks, and to understand the system architecture so that the automation is created at the correct level.

TALK: Learnings on our way to Continuous delivery in a regulated environment

Session level: intermediate

Continuous testing, continuous delivery, DevOps, digital transformations – these are all terms very popular in the last couple of years, and they all involve a shift in the way we deliver products, testing included! But when the product is providing automated financial advice or other financial services to their customers, the risk becomes a lot higher. So our first reaction is to be a lot more cautious before delivering it! But why?

I will walk you through a journey into how our teams (and this is not about the delivery team only anymore, we realised we have to include teams across the whole business) are trying to get into a faster delivery pipeline, shift testing as left as possible, whilst still having the confidence that the products provide suitable financial advice to our customers. We will look at steps we took and trials we had and what we learned from them. It’s an ongoing react&adapt process where we trial new processes, we learn from them, we adapt what we feel it helps, and we include everyone who feels they need to be included along the journey. It’s not a once and done anymore, it’s not a test phase at the end of a long journey, it’s a long continuous process!

Takeaways

• Quality is not ensured through test phase anymore
• Automation is an enabler, but everyone needs to trust it
• Learn & adapt continuously as a delivery team.

Olga Maciaszek-Sharma

VMware | Poland

BIO: Olga Maciaszek-Sharma is a software engineer in Spring Cloud Team at VMware, where she works primarily on Spring Cloud LoadBalancer, Spring Cloud Contract (of which she was the first user and one of the first contributors), Spring Cloud OpenFeign and Spring Cloud Netflix projects. She programs mostly using Java and Groovy. Before switching to working full-time on open-source libraries and frameworks, she has gained experience working with microservices where cutting-edge solutions were used as well as with complex legacy systems, implementing both new business features and tools aimed at improving the process of continuous deployment and setup of applications. Olga is also a contributor to various other OSS projects, including RestAssured, JFairy, Jenkins Pipeline Plugin, Jenkins Stash Pull Request Builder Plugin, and others. Before switching to development, she worked for more than 3 years as a Quality Assurance Engineer, specialized in test automation.

TALK: Better APIs, faster tests and more resilient systems with Spring Cloud Contract

How can we better collaborate on creating useful APIs? How to reduce the testing time of your application? How can the team build API backwards compatibility verification into their deployment process?

In this talk, I will discuss how to leverage the Consumer-Driven Contracts approach to solve these and other issues and present one of CDC implementations – Spring Cloud Contract. We will discuss practical use-cases and look at code examples. I will also point out some of the possible issues and ways of handling them, as well as some good practices I have learnt while working both as a CDC tools end-user and their developer.

Anna Radzikowska

Kanban Dragons | Poland

BIO: I have over 13 years of experience in finance, training, and project management: working in the public sector, big companies and running my own business.

I always combine project work with its practical application in daily activities, which results in continuous support, training, and improvements also after the project ends. I am kaizen culture and Kanban method passionate. Being an ACCA member helps me to better understand the business which I am working with but also gives me another angle view on different (including financial) aspects of software development and product support.

Currently I work as Product Manager of a Kanban Maturity Model, which supports modern businesses in growing into fit for purpose organization.

For 16 years already I have been playing classical, paper-based RPG (Role Playing Games), which is not only a passion but also a way to develop myself as a trainer and smuggle new techniques to the training I deliver.

TALK: How to eat an elephant? Few words about evolutionary change

Change is a process which doesn’t happen overnight on manager’s request. To go through change project management books are not enough – you have to understand what sits in people’s brains.

It is often said that change management is a very difficult process. The whole Change Management departments are established, and managers are hired just to ‘take us through this process’. And yes, change is difficult as hell. But instead of trying to force it in your company, all you need to do is to understand how people react to change and why it happens the way it does. In my talk I will explain, how change can be embraced if we only remember about few basic things, out of which the most important says ‘Start with what you do now.’

Based on real life examples and case studies I will show, what does ‘evolutionary change’ mean and how it can be applied in different groups of people, no matter if they work in IT, Business or HR. We will look together on how values of Collaboration, Agreement and Respect may help people in your organization to go through the change process, which happens not only, when managers say so; the change happens every day, even if we don’t see it.

So, how to eat an elephant? One piece at a time.
Let’s do the same with the change. Let’s see together, how to do it.

Jakub Rosiński

BEC Poland / Nykredit | Poland

BIO: Test Manager with huge interest in soft skills and strong technical background. Worked for multiple international companies and found his place in open and trusting environment of Scandinavian workplaces. Tested on different testing levels and had fun helping to improve very different applications. Keen on working in agile and making it deliver. Test manager during the day trainer and speaker whenever the opportunity arises!