Last week I participated in 3 events in Poland.
SkładQA], Akademia jakości and Peer review conference] with a lot of influential testers from Poland. About the last one, I will elaborate more in the future, for now, let’s talk about SkładQA and Akademia Jakości.
SkładQA

SkładQA is a conference that grew next to a meetup – KraQA ,
It is unique on the polish scene because it is free and self-funded.
So you won’t find here any stand presenting you offers of different companies. Only testers wherever you see.
Another interesting fact is the conference happens in the Restaurant,
and organisers embrace it during the event you can buy both food and beer. Especially beer, I was laughing that my welcome pack contained a huge pint of Pineapple Ipa.
So how was the event?
I will talk about 3 talks I liked the most:
Most of them from the first part of the event that was strongly technical and concentrated on security.
Sławek Radzymiński with „Continuous Security”
As much as I am interested in security, my skills are basic here.
But Sławek did a great job presenting how easily you can include security checks in the CI pipeline.
For example, start with checking automatically only the new code.
In the meantime slowly fix the old code, then you can enable checks for the whole codebase.
Adrian Gonciarz – „O wężu przy kawie”
Adrian had a presentation about comparing Java and Python.
He did some research and show which aspect is better in which language.
His final conclusion was that Python is a better place to start for testers.
Of course, it has some drawbacks (including some that are not directly connected to language, for example, there are more jobs on the market for testers with java)
And I agree with him. But I am biased as I am not a big fan of java (Even though it was first Object-Oriented language I’ve Learned)
Let’s meet inside by Przemysław Niedziałowski.
I was late after lunch, and I haven’t seen the first 15 or so minutes.
But overall it was a presentation about how they did grow testing community /guild in their company. He had a few interesting ideas that I will try out with my community. They all were centred around value. The testers will come for the meeting if they will see the value it brings to them.
From their experience workshops and demos worked best.
Akademia jakości

This is another event by SuccessPoint I was participating in their other event in last year. This event was a different beast, it was a much smaller event. (składQa had over 600 people, academy around 30). It has also different feeling it was much more formal.
So let’s look at my highlight:
Dr Lucjan Stapp – „Krótkie omówienie narzędzi do testowania blockchain’ów”.
Dr Stapp presented his research about tools for testing blockchain.
But what was most important for me was a factoid he brought:
The amount of energy used by bitcoins transaction is huge! I can’t find the article he showed but this one also has info.
Aleksandra Lenik – Data Driven Testing – o danych w służbie jakości
I was using Data Driven Testing with MsTest framework, I never needed to use it with anything else so far. But it was nice to see how to do it in Nunit.
What about my presentations?
In both places, I had the same presentation, „Test automation strategy – lesson learned in hell” In academy originally I was supposed to have a different subject. But I couldn’t make it work. So I asked for a change. Fortunately, They agreed.
As usual, I went too fast in both places, but people had questions and wanted to talk afterwards so overall it was a success.
That’s all for now.
Both events gave me something to think about and an opportunity to meet some new people. I wish I had extended it further but I think conference fatigue is catching me.
Next week i will be on wroc# and boiling frog. This time as normal attendee. I haven’t done that in a year 🙂 As per my speaking calendar my next presentationwill be on ConSelenium
Huge thank you to:
Adrain Gonciarz and David Pacia for the invitation to SkładQA.
Klaudia Moskala for inviting me to Akademia Jakości, and helping with last minute changes.
And last but not least Emila JavaGirl for taking me on a tour in Warsaw.