Building a culture of learning through community

I gave this talk at the Test Automation and Digital QA Summit 2019 and the focus is on giving back to the community that I learned so much from (and still learn from).

Conference:
https://www.testingmind.com/event/test-automation-and-digital-qa-summit-austin-2019/

Transcript

1. Building a culture of learning through community Evan Niedojadlo eniedojadlo randomthoughts.io
2. Current work • I am leading Site Reliability Engineering practices at Peddle for an upcoming vehicle purchasing platform here in Austin, TX • My previous work is in exploratory testing and test automation, specifically with Python, Pytest, and Selenium • I co-organize the Austin Automation Professionals meetup
3. • Solo QA assigned to multiple applications which required a deep feature understanding • My other team was remote One is the loneliest number
4. • I had heard about an upcoming event from Twitter Enter meetup.com
5. The meetup that got me hooked
6. Attending every tech meetup • Unless you have an unlimited amount of time, try and focus attendance based on what you’re working on • Note: It was difficult for me to accomplish the above
7. • Understood concepts of CI/CD • Automating tests and how that fits into the CI/CD process • Learned to not be afraid to ask questions during gatherings • Community sharing their struggles with implementation Inspiration for change
8. • Discovering various approaches to the amount of and type of tests Inspiration for change
9. • Through the Austin, TX community I was able to identity our need to adopt automation practices • Further understood that the value of an application is when it’s available in production • Discovered The Selenium Guidebook by Dave Haeffner and implemented concepts in Ruby, C#, and Python Implementing that change
10. • The technology industry moves fast • Through the community, I was able to learn where the industry was headed and apply this to my organization Community driven learning
11. • Ask questions about the structure and tech stack that other organizations are using. Why are these using these? • Lightning talks help with this transparency Community driven learning
12. • Identified areas of improvement and made a clear strategy of what I wanted to improve • I reviewed some of these strategies with friends of mine at the community who had more experience for feedback • Shared what I learned through Slack and during my monthly sync calls with our remote team Bringing the community back to my organization
13. • Trained and convinced the entire engineering team to think of automation but also ensuring applications were developed with automated e2e tests in mind Bringing the community back to my organization
14. • We were able to write a Python test suite using Pytest and Selenium • Automated hundreds of business critical tests - WIP • Increased reliability of deployments on our legacy applications • Increased transparency and business value • Everyone in the engineering team can contribute Accomplishments
15. Giving back to the community • Co-organized a meetup focused on quality and automation • Over a thousand members • Continuous sponsors
16. Giving back to the community • Providing managers or recruiters with a talent pool • Providing a place for new speakers • Networking and friendships
17. Giving back to the community • Being able to speak about an interesting project that you’re currently working on and receive feedback on that
18. • Featured on the Test Guild - Automation podcast Giving back to the community
19. Questions?
20. Austin Automation Professionals meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Austin-Automation-Professionals/ Cloud Austin meetup: https://www.meetup.com/CloudAustin/ Austin DevOps meetup: https://www.meetup.com/austin-devops/ Agile Austin DevOps SIG meetup: https://www.meetup.com/AgileAustin/ Resources
21. Test Automation U: https://testautomationu.applitools.com Selenium Guidebook By Dave Haefner: https://seleniumguidebook.com Resources