3rd The Test Tribe Mumbai Meetup Roundup

You all must be knowing by now that we have formed a tradition that our meetup attendee(s) only writes the Roundup posts and share their experience. This time Shubham Karun who is also one of our strong supporter and community believer is sharing his experience from our 3rd Mumbai meetup. Here he goes-

So this was the 3rd Mumbai Meetup by The Test Tribe and luckily, I managed to attend all of them. Like the first two meetups, the 3rd one was also scheduled at 10:30 AM at 91 Springboard but this time at the different hub(read awesomely crafted wonderful hub:)). As always I loved the 91springboard venue. We waited for around half an hour for the rest of the fellow testers to reach(Thanks to rains 😐 ) and then started with our session at 11 AM. Of course, time till then was used to know each other and have casual chats.

We started with our ritual of knowing each other(formally now), but this time we had a twist in it. We were supposed to introduce, but not ourselves, rather, the one sitting next to us. Mahesh had already made sure that no one has a person he/she already know next to him/her. For a demo, Mahesh introduced Niraj to everyone, sharing about his professional experience, his hobbies, interests, and everything which Niraj could have possibly shared about himself in an Intro. (Mahesh had the advantage of knowing the twist before, hence was prepared well I guess :p). So we got the hint of what we were supposed to do, and in no time the meeting room changed into a Chat Room with people split into pairs talking to each other as if they were already friends. Meanwhile, I realized, we were so comfortable with the fellow testers next to us, which probably wouldn’t have been the case if it was not supposed to be
a part of an activity. This complete introduction part was made live on The Test Tribe facebook group as well, check it out here and here 🙂

Post this fun activity, Mahesh spoke about the role of community in the present world and the way it changes our lives. We had a really healthy discussion on the significance of community and also how can we contribute back to the community in the process of learning and growing together. Tribals who were new to the community thing, seemed to be so convinced with it and end up putting questions like “How can we mark ourselves as a successful contributor to the community 1 year down the line?” Adding to it we also discussed on “As a community where do we see ourselves after 1 year (a very shorter period in the long run though)?”. These discussions created a clear picture about the role of community in the present era and how we, as its contributors, can make this world a better place to live in.

Now once we were clear on the idea of community and why “The Test tribe” exists, we started up with our first session by Mahesh on “Testing Trends & How we can React”. To give a gist of what he covered under this talk, it was more around how the testing space is changing each year with the help of “State of Testing” 2018 Report published by Tea Time with Testers and PractiTest every year. There were statistics indicating positive changes in the Testing space but then there were enough wake-up calls or concerning stats as well. Few areas which involved discussions were:
1. According to stats, there was almost a constant graph(2017 vs 2018) if we compare the number of individuals into testing with <1 year of experience and same goes for people with >10 years of experience. But the sad part was to know that this year people willingly coming into testing is less compared to last year.
2. The numbers suggest (2017 vs 2018) that the number of testers into the industry with 2-10 years of experience, saw a downfall in the graph. Now the area of concern is, where are these people going? Did they feel their future is insecure as testers? If that is the reason, its high time to spread awareness among the testers across the world about the role of testing in any industry and the way we look at it.
3. IT industries experiencing a lesser number of companies having dedicated VP/Directors of Quality.
4. Point #3 also asks a question, where are testers moving after 20-25 years of experience then? Moving to BA(one attendee highlighted this possibility) or some other role?
5. Trends in testing, be it Automation, scripting, security or the emerging demand for DevOps, IoT, AI, and ML.

Discussion on such topics gave much of an idea as to what is the followed trend in Testing across the world and what is the “need of the hour” if we consider ourselves as a passionate fellow tester, eager to learn and grow together. With this, we wrapped up our 90 min long session including in-depth discussions, and question-answer round. Thanks to Mahesh for bringing up such a beautiful yet a concerning topic to discuss on. Post that, we took a quick coffee break where we few of us were also busy selecting places to take selfies at :p .

Meanwhile, Niraj was all set with his presentation on “Transformative Hacks for Everyday Learning”. Very soon we all settled up for our second session, which started up with a giveaway. Niraj was about to give away writing notepad, but the criteria for the same was you must be having a book in your bag which you were
carrying to the meetup. Forget about meetups, I never carried books in my college days too :|. So, I was out of the game. He brought four writing notepads but just one was won by Hamza. Anyway, jokes apart, this session was all about how Reading books can affect your life to a great extent, rather bringing out a new version of “You”.

Disappointed right? “ahh! that’s not something for me, I’m not a bookworm” or “I don’t have a habit of reading, and I’m helpless when trying to create the same”. Well, I too felt the same when he introduced the content of the topic to us. But Later did I realized the importance of reading books. He also talked about some great leaders like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, APJ Abdul Kalam who loved reading books in spite of having a damn busy schedule. So right from the beginning of the session, he removed the biggest EXCUSE from everyone’s mind of “too busy to read books” 😀 . Niraj was all prepared with answers for whatever question a non-book-lover can have in their mind.

Starting from:
1. Why should we read books?
2. How to take out time from our busy schedule to read books?
3. How to develop the habit of reading books?
4. How different it is when we read books and when we see the same thing in Videos?

Nevertheless, I would like to share the answer to the last question which was not the part of the presentation but asked by me as it was so beautifully answered by Trina and that was:
When you read books, the moment you read any statement you imagine a scene out of it and that imagination can take you anywhere. When you read books you unknowingly start developing a great imagination power in you, and with imagination comes creativity which can no doubt take you to a different level altogether as a person.

With such great learnings and experience, we winded up both our sessions with a huge round of applause for both the presenters. We then went for snacks where we talked about our future meetup plans and can everyone contribute to it. Post that we took some group pictures with all happy faces taking back a lot of learnings from the session meanwhile meeting some new tribals and helping increase the TTT family as well. Also Credits to Priyabrata Das for capturing all those good moments from the meetup in camera.