3 things to take away from this year’s Tesena Fest Vienna

At the beginning of March, the premier Tesena Fest Vienna took place. This event was fully dedicated to the field of software testing and brought over 60 testing experts, 4 speakers, 3 workshops, 1 panel discussion and many new insights that the attendees could take away with them and later apply in practice to the capital city of Austria. Weren’t you able to join us? Read about the topics that were discussed here, find out what the speakers talked about and get a small taste of the conference in the form of 3 tips for better testing.  

What was Tesena Fest Vienna about?

The presentations and workshops focused on current topics in software testing. For example, we delt with the agile approach, DevOps, test automation, artificial intelligence, security and testing in the cloud. 

The first to take the stage was Christoph Börner who explained how to ensure the highest security amongst a chain of software suppliers. Oleksandr Trutniev followed and using the concept of story mapping he got rid of our fear of backlogging. The third in line was our keynote Derk-Jan de Grood with the introduction of challenges and solutions regarding built-in software quality. How to ensure software robustness and how to deal with “test smells” was then explained by Mesut Durukal. 

The presentations were followed by interactive and practical workshops. The attendees of the Rik Marselis’ workshop learned about an elegant technique of test design. Dominik Schildorfer’s group found out how DevOps works in practice and how to approach setting goals and values in teams, while Jennifer Bonine provided her audience with knowledge necessary on their way to use artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

Which thoughts may inspire you?

1. Don’t be afraid of disrupting your process and take time to improve it 

Improving and Accelerating the delivery of business value while also involving modernized security which can keep up with the speed of DevOps is one of the core values in DevOps culture. However, this improvement can be accompanied by the disruption of processes that the company is used to. 

Since there is a lot of pressure on delivering quality software, companies often don’t have time to focus on refining their processes. On the other hand, only the companies that automate well and develop their CI/CD pipelines can ship into production more than a hundred times per week. 

2. How to avoid test smells 

In the talk about test robustness we found out how to prevent “test smells” that is usually present in bad testing strategies for unit tests. We can include the following in this not too fragrant category: 

• Assertion Roulette (Test Method contains more than one undocumented assertion statement)
• Conditional Test Logic (Test Method contains more than one control statement)
• Default Test (Test Classes named as default)
• Duplicate Assert (More than one assertion statement with same parametres) 
• Empty Test (Test method does not contain executable statements)

3. Backlog prioritization does not have to be a painstaking exercise 

Prioritizing the backlog is one of the crucial parts of agile development. Sometimes this process raises more questions for the team than it answers. In a talk about a concept called „Story Mapping“, we learned how to turn an overcrowded backlog of individual user stories into context and help the team focus on the goals of the delivery not only the features centered around the user, but also technical matters – in this case primarily test automation. 

Conclusion

With many more topics discussed, and 3 interactive workshops our attendees chose from in the afternoon, Tesena Fest Vienna was the place to be this year. We would like to thank our speakers, workshop leaders and attendees thanks to whom we were able to join learning and fun together. We are already looking forward to the interesting topics that will be discussed at one of our next Tesena Fests or our other events including webinars, Testing Breakfast Club or Klikaton.