Testival Meetup #77, Zagreb, Croatia
by Željko Filipin
The estimated reading time is about 2 minutes.
Meetup
For me the meetup started with a beautiful bike ride to the venue. As usual, Karlo Šmid joined me on the bike ride after the meetup. We had some time for a longer chat.
About thirty to forty people were at the meetup. An average for our meetups. There were even several people online. (We usually don’t have an online option.)
There were a couple of talks and several lightning talks.
- Sanjin Grahovar Sadiković - Maestro: A Modern Take on Mobile Test Automation
- Greg Paskal - AI Insights for the Quality Minded
It was a good meetup. It was organized by Tomislav Prša. He’s taking more and more of the organization. I’m glad the next generation is taking over.
Maestro: A Modern Take on Mobile Test Automation
Maestro looks interesting. It’s a mobile test automation tool. It was fun to see in the documentation how to automate Wikipedia Android application page.
I already have an idea for a project where I would like to try it out.
I’m not impressed by using YAML for writing tests. (There seems to be a JavaScript option too.) (I once strongly discouraged a team at work that was writing an automation framework from using YAML. They eventually picked JavaScript.) YAML is great for demos. Even for some simple use cases. It would probably not be a good choice for any even moderately big test suite. I prefer to write tests in real programming languages. All the way back in 2001, Bret Pettichord wrote Hey Vendors, Give Us Real Scripting Languages.
AI Insights for the Quality Minded
I’m not sure why the host company wanted to have a remote speaker. We usually only have in person meetups, with in person speakers. That said, Greg Paskal did a good job.
These days, no event can happen without somebody talking about AI. He talked about using various AI tools for various tasks, and for which of those tasks tools did a good job and for which tasks they failed.
Lightning talks
One of the best parts of every meetup are lightning talks. (Up to five minutes long.) We had three this time.
- Marko Bjelac - Većina koda je bljak. (Most of the code is yuck.)
- Mostly a commercial for the meetup he’s organizing, Zagreb Software Crafters. Lightning talks are perfect for such announcements.
- Karlo Šmid - Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) by Sebastian Raschka.
- Book report.
- Željko Filipin - Taking Testing Seriously by James Bach and Michael Bolton.
- I have proposed we read the book together, like a book club. We’ll see how that goes.
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tags: event - testing - testival