Romanian Testing Conference - a unique learning experience

Working as a tester nowadays requires to have quite a bit of knowledge about up-and-coming releases on the IT market, what trends are popping-up in the community of practice and how you can hone your technical skills, so as to be a valuable asset for the business.

While some of these may be achieved with hands-on work, another important way of furthering your know-how is by participating in specialised testing events.

This was the case for some of our colleagues in eggs, who recently participated in one of the biggest testing conferences from Eastern Europe - the Romanian Testing Conference (in short, RTC). By bringing together experienced practitioners and testing enthusiasts, the three-days event tackled a variety of subjects in a friendly and open environment.

Everyone - from new-comers to specialists - had the opportunity to learn more about their preferred subjects and acquire further expertise in their topics of choice.

The conference had a rather complex structure, with many international speakers holding day-long workshops, apart from the discussions included in the last day of the event.

The main topic addressed throughout the lectures was - Enabling change - and this was approached from various angles: either from personal experiences, where change has influenced both positively and negatively the career path of the speaker, or from a job-related perspective, where change can be oftentimes hard to grapple with.

Having such a wide variety of choices, the first day was spent addressing one of my most anticipated trainings from the schedule - Exploratory testing that catches bugs. A workshop that catered for all levels of expertise, it presented us with details as to what exploratory testing represents, how this can be a valuable asset paired with other types of testing and how, despite the rise of AI and its capabilities, manual testing still remains the only way to go about exploring your application under test.

Our speaker for the day was Peter Sabev, a pioneer of exploratory testing and a passionate coach. Through practical exercise and with the help of the various testing techniques under the umbrella of exploratory testing, we managed to show our skills by testing a live time-management application - and found a ton on bugs!

The second day of the event challenged the participants with a fast-paced, technical workshop on API testing and automated checks via C#.

Our trainer, Hilary Weaver-Robb, engaged our focus and skills, leading us through the intricacies of APIs, how they can be relevant for testing and what tools we would need in order to have a reliable and efficient test process, that can greatly contribute to the quality of the product.

Finally, the last day of the event was the actual conference day, where the participants had the chance to jump from one talk to another, depending on their preferences and curiosities related to testing.

While some discussions were more technical ( for instance, how one could run 100 automated tests in just under 1 minute, using the newly hyped-over Playwright library), others brought to light social aspects that may impact the usability and popularity of an application.

The latter matter was addressed in a talk concerning accessibility testing - how can we, as specialised practitioners, make sure that our product is accessible to people with various disabilities, and how we can draw attention to the importance of presenting said product as widely-usable.

As a whole, RTC was an enjoyable, knowledge-packed event that favoured skill-sharing and networking within the international testers’ community.