vodQA nite without any hangover

Its been long time since there was any activity in this blog. Finally time has come to break the silence

Yesterday me and ravi had attended vodQA nite, A conference intended to bring all QA from different companies to share ideas. This is the first time I have heard in my career about any conference conducted only for QA. This gives me positive vibes towards QA profession which was listed most times in 'others' category.

I come back to the main topic vodQA nite. Frankly speaking My Intention of attending this conference was to move away from the routine QA we do. Most of the topics were about automation, from different people from different companies. Who doesnt want to know how these skills are practiced in different companies, because there are always different perspectives.

Venue of the conference was Thoughtworks, Yerwada, Pune. True to its name it was kind of IT park with tall well designed buildings and a pleasant environment, people mostly dressed in formals carrying tags roaming around :)

we were searching for the venue inside IT park, Finally we found it. we were stopped at the entrance to show the gatepass. we didnt have one. we went to get the gate pass and then entered thoughtworks building.

As we entered we saw lot of people who had come to attend conference. I just glanced through 360deg and got the first look of the venue. It got me thinking, because It was one of its kind

No cubicles
Seating arrangement as if you are sitting in a conference hall
Studio kind of setup
colorful sticky notes
dashbords

Overall what I felt was it was something different from the routine work environment setup, my expectations about the presentations were high now. This is the list of

Speakers & Topics:

•Swapnil Kadu from Synechron Technologies - Transitioning from Waterfall to Agile - Challenges
•Srinivas Chillara from etakey - Trials & Tribulations
•Sumit Agrawal - Automation Execution results Dashboard
•Sagar Surana from Amdocs Dev. Ltd - Intelligent test design
•Manish Kumar from ThoughtWorks - Be Agile, Get Rapid Feedback
•Anand Bagmar from ThoughtWorks - Future of Test Automation Tools & Infrastructure
•Sudeep Somani from ThoughtWorks - Decoupled Automation Frameworks
•Chirag Doshi from ThoughtWorks - Write tests in the end-user's lingo

It was very refreshing and good learning from few of the presentations especially the last 4 topics. It gave a glimpse of where QA is heading towards. All the presentations has something new to offer, it was an interactive conference. we met one of an old acquaintance Ketan, he was a consultant from SNS who had come to help us with poker testing, he briefed us about the company, people, work culture and type of work. It was Impressive, he said its tought to get in thoughtworks becoz it has 7 rounds and I understand now, if you have to clear 7 rounds then what stuff you need to have :)

Overall event was well organized and I felt satisfied after attenting that I did not waste my time. I suggest you to attend if it happens any other time. I will be there too :)

Note: I forgot to mention, we also had a chance to meet Ayyappa whose Office is in same building. we spent some time over tea discussing all topics in one go as usual ;)