Continuous integration, involving daily code base repository updates and automated testing, is in the center of software quality assurance. This process is important in order to verify the matters concerning suitability, compatibility, and efficiency of a given software.
On September 22, 2016 Atlantbh organized meetup which did attract more than 30 different people from different successful companies. Most of these came to share their knowledge, research, and experience totally different type of meetup: the QA and Testing UnMeetup.
We had two different themes, two groups of people on two floors, but without a lecturer. The idea was to have moderators, but have the audience with an open communication platform. This setting was meant to help members participate in creating content.
On the first floor, there were a total of 18 people at the Continuous Integration/Jenkins session.
Session started out with an introduction to Continuous Integration, for those that were not so familiar with it. From there, the discussion continued with a review of few CI examples that people from Atlantbh provided through diagrams and Jenkins job configurations, comparing it with TeamCity software, and concluding how similar it is to Jenkins in its core.
We talked about use Jenkins in every project in the company, and how we use various plugins to configure jobs for different uses, combining building and deployment of latest code, testing and code revisions, email notifications, etc.
In the end, engineers from Atlantbh, Comtrade, and Mistral, that have experience with CI, encouraged the rest of the session to try to set up basic Jenkins structure and connect it with Source Code Management solutions, notification systems, and deployment platforms.
The other group of 12 people attended the Mobile Automation UnMeetup session.
After the introductions, we at Atlantbh started the session with a short talk about the importance of mobile automation and how the Atlantbh QA engineers conduct mobile automation and what QA technology stack we use. The attendees discussed the problem of fragmentation – many device manufacturers with many operating system versions are the greatest challenge in mobile test automation, both for Android and iOS. Our guests from NSoft (Mostar) were curious about running tests in parallel – a research QA engineers in Atlantbh spent a lot of time on. We discussed cloud solutions like the AWS Device Farm, where QA engineers can use a variety of hosted devices for testing – automated and manual, with the conclusion that these solutions are pricy for smaller companies. We had a short show-and-tell session, where we did a demo for our parallel test execution tool. We hope our guests liked our custom solution and that they will consider contributing to it, as it is shared on the Atlantbh GitHub repository as open-source software.
The success of the meetup can be summarized in the submissions made by Sumejja Šljivić Ivojević working at Mistral Technology company. In her remarks, Sumejja did state that the meetup had “…gathered many people with the same or very similar professional interests, thus providing an excellent opportunity to all”.
Conclusively, we can submit the UnMeetup was very beneficial for all the participants. This was emphasized by Zlatan Čilić, a software testing engineer at Atlantbh who at the end of the event submitted that “… everyone was really satisfied with this un meetup” and that it provided an opportunity to meet “…people from other companies and share our research, experiences, stories, tips, questions, and advice. This evening was entirely great and significant for the software testing community in our country.