I had a pleasure to be speaker and attendee on the Quality Excites Conference. The conference took place last Saturday in Gliwice on the 24th of June, 2017. That’s was a very hot day with a very cool atmosphere during the event. The conference attracted people excited by software quality. We could meet both quality experts and also those attendees who became more aware of software quality after the conference.
Place
The event was in “Cechownia”, a building which is part of “New Gliwice” Business and Education Centre GAPR (the Upper Silesian Agency for Entrepreneurship and Promotion Ltd.). It’s a very calm and pleasant venue for such events. There was enough place inside during sessions and during breaks. For the two tracks, there were two rooms – Room A and Room B. Room A was more convenient than Room B mainly because of air conditions.
Conference
The conference’s organizers say:
Quality Excites (QE) is a Polish nationwide conference on software quality, dedicated to the professionals who use the newest technologies and the best practices[1].
The overall organization was on a very high level. The execution was fluent, food and drinks were very good. In addition to this, the conference was for free. Most of the presentations were delivered in polish language. It may take time till a conference become an international one. However, is it a goal for organizers? That’s a one thing organizers can consider. The day before the conference there were workshops. Even though the workshops agenda looked promising, I didn’t take part in them on my busy Friday. Workshops are accompanying events to a regular conference and QE organized them too. That’s also advantage. Another consideration is to make conference talk sessions two-day long. There was also after party on Saturday. I didn’t attend it. I hope that’s as good as the conference.
The QE conference has a growing potential. Moreover, the organizers say:
Year by year, the event attracts more and more people who are interested in Quality Assurance (QA) and who want to influence the field[1].
Thanks to events like that, attendees from whole country, and thanks to local human potential we all growth well. Combining all these factors, Gliwice and Silesia region in general become more attractive for us and for external parties as well. Hope, that it will help bringing more IT companies and organizations here. In result it will make the Silesian IT market more competitive.
Content
Some IT conferences are focused on pure technical aspects, some on soft issues while others on software development in general. This one is clearly focused on software quality. That’s extremely good choice. It’s what market needs to. People quite often connect quality with testing. This connection is only partially correct. Testing is not a quality itself. Moreover, testing is not about providing quality directly. The conference proves that. We can notice that the agenda was very balanced. We could see presentations taking into consideration topics about testable software architecture, BDD, agile, automated tests, reports, metrics, unit tests, manual tests etc. It had impact on sessions. Every session considered different aspects and was delivered in different way. These various talks had quality in mind. We recognize that quality is a subject of every stage in the development lifecycle. Quality should be baked in a product. It’s not what can be introduce once we’re done with product. The conference’s rich content shows that well.
Agile mythbusters
The conference was also an opportunity for me to be a speaker. As a speaker I delivered a talk – Agile mythbusters, together with my colleagues from work – Monika and Michał. I hope the talk was interesting for many attendees. We presented some common agile myths and then we considered them. We put emphasis on false believing about Scrum. The talk was about quality in planning and executing agile methods in organizations. We got few interesting questions after the presentation. We experienced people curiosity and excitement about properly working agile process.
Pictures
Summary
The conference attracts people for whom software quality does matter. I recommend the event for all people interested in delivering high quality software. Basically, the event boosts mindset into taking quality into the whole development process and understanding that quality is not just verification.