TestBash New Zealand Experience Report

By Satinder Kaur

My name is Satinder, I live in Auckland with my family and I am relatively new to software testing. I studied in IT for my bachelor degree but never continued work in IT, as I started a family when I was quite young. After relocating to New Zealand I wanted to start my career in Information Technology so I did some research and decided that I would go for software testing. While looking for any opportunities to begin with, I came across the company where I presently intern as a tester. I remember on my very first day at work, my mentor introduced me to the Ministry of Testing meetups. I joined the MOT meetup group in Auckland and ever since, have been part of the amazing test community in Auckland. 

Winning tickets to TestBash

I started going to the MOT meetups and joined the Slack channel, where one day I saw a post about TestBash New Zealand. I was excited but at the same time, it looked like I won’t be able to make it, considering the fact that I am doing an internship. But a few days later, I found out that there was a competition for a sponsored place to TestBash. I took my chance and answered questions and entered the competition without any delay. Somewhere in my heart, I was hoping to win one of the three tickets, but my brain was telling me it won’t happen. 

However on one fine day of June (a month later), when I had almost forgotten about the competition, I was surprised by an email from Heather Reid of  MOT saying “Congratulations you are one of our lucky winners!!”.

I can’t express how great it felt. I got my air tickets sorted as the conference was going to be in Wellington and started eagerly awaiting the day.

The TestBash day

I arrived at Wellington the night before the TestBash. The conference was at the beautiful Te Papa museum, which is located on the waterfront in Wellington central business district. I was greeted by some lovely people from Flux Federation and some familiar faces from Auckland. I was thrilled to meet Heather in person, and one of my friends, who was one of the organizers,  introduced me to all the cool people at the conference! 

The day began with Lean coffee and some cool merchandise (MOT logo t-shirts, notepad, bottles, pen, chargers) from the awesome sponsors Flux Federation and Assurity. The talks were not only around testing but overall learning and growth. One of the talks touched very sensitive topics and initiated a discussion on the role we testers can play toward ensuring the quality of products that we are testing. The MC did an amazing job making the whole day an enjoyable experience. Some of the speakers were familiar and some were new faces. I got a chance to meet my favorite people in testing through this conference. I learned many great things ranging from deliberate learning to observability and its importance, a new approach to the automation tests we write, and also learnt more about the Ministry of Testing, the Dojo and so much more.

The whole day was full of opportunities to network and meet new people and learn about their journeys. I found many people who had a bit of a struggle in starting off their careers and got inspired by what they have achieved. 

Later in the evening, there was a meetup at Assurity’s Wellington office, where there was a chance to catch up with people again and discuss about talks and the whole day’s experience. I got a chance to sit amongst the speakers and learn their viewpoints about many areas in tech. 

I am grateful to the Ministry of Testing and the amazing folks at Flux Federation, for giving me this opportunity to witness the first TestBash in New Zealand. This experience has filled me with ideas and has spurred some thinking about what I am doing and my future in testing. I am even more motivated to work on my skills and knowledge and to become a valuable tester to an organization.

Author Bio

I’m a Test Analyst Intern at MVP Studio in Auckland. I have been with my present company for a year, where I worked on two projects so far. In my internship, I have learned manual testing and automation testing. I have worked on developing test scripts for automating test cases using Selenium, for API testing I have used Postman tool. I am learning more about CI/CD, use of docker for running automated tests. I am enjoying my journey of becoming a better tester. When I am not testing I like to spend time with my family, read books or go for a walk.

I can be found on social media through my Twitter account, Linkedin or by my email satinderkaur26@gmail.com.