Testival Meetup #66, Zagreb, Croatia

Introduction

This is the second time I’ve attended a Testival meetup while on parental leave. The first time was in 2014 while the meetup was still called Zagreb Software Testing Club. That’s how much I care for that community. I attend meetups even on parental leave.

I have almost missed this meetup. I did not get email notification from meetup.com about the meetup. I don’t use social networks much, but I have checked Facebook a few weeks before the meetup and noticed the announcement for the meetup there. But, it was too late. All available places were taken. I joined the waiting list and almost forgot about it. Just before the meetup I checked if I’d made it to the list of attendees and, to my surprise, I did. I didn’t receive any notification from meetup.com, again, that I’m no longer on the waiting list. So, I’ve almost missed the meetup, twice.

I met Karlo on the way to the venue, so we had a chat even before the event started. There was tight security at the entrance, everybody had to show an ID. Given the event was in a bank, it does make sense. The venue was at the top floor of the building, in a restaurant with a nice view of the city.

I’m really glad that the Testival community has new organizers, since the previous organizers all stepped down. I only wish the meetups were more frequent. But then, I know everybody is busy.

Talks

There were two talks. I was really pleasantly surprised with the quality of the talks. Sometimes, the meetups are more about socializing than talks, but this time both were an important part of the event.

There were two talks.

• Ivan Horvat - Testing A Legacy Application (What google doesn’t know)
• Vatroslav Mileusnić - State of QA salaries from TABU data

The first talk was an interesting story about trying to fix flaky Selenium tests for a complicated and important business legacy app. The problem appeared suddenly, was there for a year or two, then disappeared as suddenly as it appeared. They never learned what caused it, but it did inspire them to refactor the test suite.

The second talk was about Tabu, a local IT salary database. The talk was focused on QA salaries. The talk had very interesting data. They claim to have about 50% of the IT salaries in Croatia. The only problem I have with local salaries is that I don’t compete on the local, but global market. But, it looks like I’m in the minority.

My favorite part of the meeting, lightning talks, didn’t happen.

Links

• Testival Meetup #66 at meetup.com
• Slides at drive.google.com