a1qa Summer 2017 brings together the leading QA experts

The internal conference a1qa Summer has become a significant event in the company’s corporate life. Every year the meetup brings together seasoned specialists, managers, newcomers, and clients to discuss the best projects and new testing technologies. The last summer weekend, for the seventh straight year, a1qa has united more than 300 participants meeting to talk all things QA.

This year the topic of the event read simple – The Recipes of a Successful QA Chef. Indeed, QA experts willingly shared their professional secrets and tricks.

All the reports were divided into three sections. The main one, Projects’ Kitchen, focused on the biggest a1qa projects the team carried out within the last year. The section covered a wide array of topics: test automation, DevOps, BI systems testing, etc.

The second section, Experts’ Kitchen, was focused on the specific challenges that QA teams face, and the participants here discussed automation testing of a complex distributed system, the mobile testing specifics, the difference between localization and internationalization testing.

Finally, the third section was a practical one called Workshop with QA chef and included the series of practical workshops for testers and QA specialists. The seminars gave anyone a chance to learn from testing gurus and apply the knowledge in real-case scenarios. Overall, the participants could attend six practical sessions, where they discovered Ubuntu tricks, studied SQL injections and XSS attacks and practiced in BDT and Gherkin.

Vitaly Prus, Head of the Agile Testing Department and one of the event coordinators, claims that the commitment of a1qa specialists to the conference was surprising. “Initially, we expected a small number of employees would apply to become a speaker. But it was the other way around, and we received a lot of applications”, he admitted. “Next year we will pay more attention to the size of the rooms, make sections of the same size so that everyone can attend what he or she wants,” noted Vitaly.

Professional development in QA got a lot of attention as well. It wasn’t a big surprise that the Best a1qa Summer 2017 Speaker award went to Elena Dovgalyuk, Head of HR Business Partners Department, with the “Important Years for Your Career, or Reasons Not to Postpone Your Career for Future” presentation.

At the end of the conference, the results of the internal a1qa Security Contest 2017 were announced. The coordinators of the contest – experts from the Security Testing Center of Excellence – underlined that in 2017 the number of participants doubled comparing to the previous year.

At the end of the conference, Svetlana Pravdina, a1qa CEO, took the floor.

“Thanks to all speakers and organizers who invested their energy to make this day better, so that we could do our work better tomorrow,” said Svetlana. “Thanks to everyone who created this top-notch conference! Seven years is a tradition.”

We are grateful to all conference coordinators, speakers, a1qa specialists, and our honourable clients who made their time to visit us.

See you next year in August when the 2018 conference brings together the best QA experts again!