Month: July 2017

Quality Excites 2017 review

Daniel, Leave a comment

About

Quality Excites (QE) is a Polish nationwide conference on software quality, dedicated to the professionals who use the newest technologies and the best practices. Year by year, the event attracts more and more people who are interested in Quality Assurance (QA) and who want to influence the field.

The attendees include software developers, project managers, product owners and designers. The popularity of QE is not only represented by the growing number of speakers and participants. The second year in a row, Quality Excites took 1st place in the voting for the best testing events in Poland, within the category of free conferences.

https://qualityexcites.pl/en/

Attendee

Slides from all presentations should be available on Future Processing slideshare soon. Below some of my thoughts on topics that I was able to attend.

Keynote: Testable Software Architecture
Aslak Hellesøy

Good keynote from creator of Cucumber. At first I was a little bit worried because Aslak was talking about things which was also a part of my talk 🙂 However in middle point he change direction. The only regret that I have is it was quite basic stuff. I identify with statements that tests should be as fast as possible and feedback loop should be as short as possible. Also he told how to maintain architecture in a testable way.

Introduction to machine learning
Marcin Drobik

Quite nice introduction to Machine Learning. I did expect something totally different, but I enjoyed theoretical stuff. It made me think that stuff that I learned at my University can be used for real needs. Marcin did simplify things as much as possible, so definitely it was good “Introduction”. Mission accomplished!

SQA in TestOps era
Dawid Pacia, Tomasz Janiszewski

From my perspective this presentation was rather basic. Short feedback loops, automation everywhere, monitoring- that kind of stuff. However, if someone was there to check if this whole “DevOps, TestOps” culture is for him/her then it could be really interesting.

How to increase the value of unit tests?
Michał Kopacz, Łukasz Wróbel

The only one presentation I did not like. Maybe because of PHP source code examples, maybe because of presentation flow. I just don’t feel it. Also, I did not agree with certain statements and would like to discuss them with speakers someday.

Developer on detox
Michał Płachta

This one was great. If you haven’t seen that then honestly you need to watch recording as soon as it will be published. Presentation about being aware of our limitations- don’t judge too soon, don’t make decisions only based on opinions without facts. Love it.

SOLID Page Objects — Screenplay Pattern in action
Tomasz Kras

Another really good presentation- this time much more technical. Tomasz describe briefly Screenplay pattern which is “Page Object Pattern” on steroids. Very, very, very good introduction.

Speaker

I talked about Evolving Architecture from a totally different perspective than usual (4Developers 2017, Confitura 2017, JUG BB Meetup, IPIJ). I tried to use my experience with quality assurance from various projects and connect them with my topic. I regret that I didn’t change description and topic name- these talks are quite different (about 50% of this presentation is different than “basic” Evolving Architecture).

You can find slides from my talk here.

Best talk!

As far as i know my talk was rated by conference attendees as the best talk of Quality Excites 2017 with rating 4.90! Thank You all! 

Organization

What I liked:

  • Food! Please, don’t even think about change 🙂
  • Immediate feedback boxes:

  • Block A lecture hall,
  • Countdown speaker timer 🙂

What can be improved:

  • Web page. I was not able to share direct link to any presentation. Its (a little bit) annoying from speaker perspective, but also from attendee perspective.
Quality Excites 2017 review

Confitura 2017 retrospective

Daniel, 1 Comment

Last weekend I have attended Confitura 2017 conference. This year not only as a participant, but also as a speaker with my “Evolving Architecture” talk! I must admit it was my dream to speak at this event someday. I don’t have enough words to explain this feeling 🙂 I always thought about Confitura as one of the biggest and the greatest Java events in Poland. Being a part of this was truly awesome!

Attendee

mid-sized building blocks and hexagonal architecture in real life
Jakub Nabrdalik

Jakub focused on (underestimated sometimes) package-level architecture. His basic statement was to divide source code using package-by-feature, not package-by-layer approach. Then he shows how to better hide class visibility using my beloved package-private access scope. I really, really enjoyed this presentation.

Slides here.

Studium przypadku wystarczająco dobrej architektury
Jakub Kubryński

Good presentation about high level approach to create “good enough” distributed architecture. Kuba point out that e2e tests are very expensive and should cover only really critical path. Also he mention that performance tests are far more expensive than e2e tests and should be skipped. His solution instead is to provide good monitoring. I really liked approach where you can allow pushing bugs to production but only in case that these are not critical and you can deliver fixup within minutes or hours. And you can achieve that only with good and quality unit and integration tests.

Slides: here.

DDD: Q&A – czyli co gryzie świadomego programistę/programistkę
Sławomir Sobótka

This talk was about asking good questions while using DDD approach. I need to admit that I was a little bit nervous before my presentation to be 100% focused on Sławek talk. However this session for sure was for people with at least some experience with DDD. Again there was CQRS approach and statement that CRUD APIs can exist alongside with REST API and cooperate.

Testy wydajności z Gatlingiem
Andrzej Ludwikowski

Really nice talk about testing in gatling (actually its my favorite performance tool at the moment). Source code examples were quite basic and straightforward (which was really good if you look at gatling first time). I really enjoyed first part of presentation where Andrzej show a few popular problems which can cause false-positive tests results and in the end didn’t show performance problem – which is basic idea of these kind of tests 🙂

What’s more – maybe I did found my next pet project! There was a question how to compare previous tests results with current (to find delta) and there was no answer to this question at this session. I’ll need to investigate this topic and if there is nothing out there than small tool which will analyze two gatling result files and draw diagrams (or just put these data to grafana board, as someone in the crowd suggested) would be nice.

Slides: here.

Code Review – how to do it better?
Sebastian Malaca

Good talk about very important topic. I really like approach with very small merge requests, however I did not feel how to implement this approach in my current project. But whats most important. This session made me think about CRs once more. For sure its time to rethink current approach in my project and talk about this topic on next retrospective meeting.

Slides: here.

Speaker

I did talk about “Evolving Architecture” (I did this talk also at 4Developers conference and BB JUG recently, and also have one smaller version which was delivered for IPIJ). Each time it was a little bit different, each time with different energy and “flow”. Would I do it again? Definitely! I’m sure I will start next year in C4P for Confitura 2018! This feeling and energy is outstanding 🙂 Thank you all for choosing my talk during V4P and coming to see me there! I hope that I met your expectations.

My slides: here.

SPOINA Party

Great place, great people. Unfortunately because I was pushed to stand up early this day (~4:00 AM) I was too tired to stay long. Next year I definitely will come to Warsaw a day before conference to have enough strength for party 🙂

See you next year!

Confitura 2017 retrospective