In the interest of full disclosure, I may possibly have networked just a little too hard after Day Three of the conference. At the very least, I got a “delightful” reminder that at the start of Day Four that I’m no longer twenty-two, and recovering from a late night sometimes takes a little more than chasing a handful of Vitamin I with a liter of water, a quad-Venti mocha, and horking down a breakfast burrito or a couple of Egg McMuffins.
Onward and upward though, because Day Four was the first official conference day of Agile + DevOps East! No half-day class sessions today, just traditional hour-long sessions, with breaks to visit the Expo hall, chat with vendors, and schmooze with colleagues.
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| Did I mention swag? Because the eighteen vendors at this conference gave out more and better items than I collected from the hundreds of booths at PAX East combined. Best of all, everyone here understands how to use a shower, and people weren’t standing in a sweaty mob 200 deep for a foam sword. |
The opening Keynote session, called Beyond the Phoenix Project by John Willis, added a solid stack of books to my reading list, plus a new entry in my “Favorite Quotes” list. The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win vaulted way up my list. I’m going to try and get this read before the year is over.
Of the other sessions that I attended, Continuous Integration is Not Test Automation by Adam Auerbach was my particular favorite. Continuous Integration (or CI for short) is another one of those tech buzzwords that I’ve been hearing more and more of in the past couple of years. We mentioned it a few times in the Test Automation course as something that requires a rock-solid automation strategy for success, but didn’t necessarily get too much deeper than that.
This talk got a lot farther into the weeds of what CI is and is not, and more especially why CI isn’t test automation all by itself, and why neither CI nor a functional test automation strategy means the demise of QA in an organization.
One of the overall things I’ve gotten from this conference is a renewed excitement for where QA is going in the future, not to mention the need for effective test engineers. Something that stuck with me from getting laid off from Monolith was when the professional outplacer looked over my résumé and told me that my career experience was a mile wide and an inch deep. In 2011 and 2012, that made me a very tough sell. In 2018 that makes me someone with “T-Shaped Skills”, who can play a utility role in an Agile team and take some of the pressure of more specialized team members.
In 2013, I was told that the SDET (Software Developer in Test, a Microsoft term for Software Test Engineers) was all but extinct within MS, and that traditional QA would be done within five years. With CI, the explosion of mobile device environments, and more and more companies accepting the Gospel of Agile, SDETs and QA are more in demand than we’ve been in a decade, and that doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon.