As a proud member of the global testing community, I have often wondered how can we motivate and reignite community spirit in these times of uncertainty and difficulty? Global Testing Retreat 2021 has demonstrated that it is done with sheer passion and dedication for the community! Having been a jury member of this amazing event, I have been awe stuck by how well organized, creative, inclusive, and inspirational experience it has been. Hundreds of testing professionals joined from around the world came together to this brilliant conference to share knowledge, to learn and to celebrate the testing community spirit. The two-day event was packed with thought-provoking talks, demos, lab sessions and so much more! With over 139 participating organizations, over 50 speakers and more than 500 registered participants, this event has been conducted on a phenomenal scale!

My association with ATAGTR 2021 started from being a part of the Jury, where I had the opportunity to review submissions for the conference and contribute towards building the schedule. The quality of submissions and speakers was incredibly high, making it one of the toughest tasks I have done till date! It has been wonderful to witness that the decision-making process to lead to a fantastic schedule has been very fulfilling. The event was studded with a marvelous line-up of talks and sessions, each one delivered immense value to the audience. The conference team who worked tirelessly brought together a seamless event which left hundreds of participants glued to the proceedings of the event. I have been left buzzing with inspiration having witnessed it firsthand and here are some highlights from my experience of this memorable congregation:

1) Riveting Key notes: Over the two days, testing scholars Maaret Pyhäjärvi, Michael Bolton, Shawn Jaques and Aditya Garg dazzled the virtual stage with enlightening points on topics of great relevance to the testers. Maaret Pyhäjärvi’s topic of ‘I have a Rock in My Shoe – Navigating Improvement’ around how testers can be a voice of influence and positive change agent through steps of being able recognize an area of discomfort and bringing improvements. Identifying how testers are often perceived as change agents and often come under pressure to improve quality with little consideration into feasibility. She shared several ideas like identifying the discomfort, sharing work, dealing with rejection or old practices to highlight how testers can manage the expectation. Michael Bolton‘s topic of ‘Demonstration, Experiment, and Testing’ brought an excellent analogy of testing with scientific experiments, encouraging audience to explore new perspectives of a tester’s role. Michael highlighted the importance of testing being treated as a science, staying true to the base principles like observation, corroboration, challenging the perceived understanding. At the end of Day 1 Shawn Jaques shared amazing insight into how ‘It’s Time to Rethink TestOps Session’ elaborating how to scale up testing for increased churn or features in a project through the concept of TestOps, a methodology for improving planning, governance, team coordination – to continually improve quality. On Day 2, GTR team’s own Aditya Garg delivered a brilliant talk on ‘Selenium 4 Observability – a 90 Min Hands on Lab’ which was skillfully delivered providing audience great insight into the various tools and techniques in key highlights of implementing frameworks with Selenium 4 grid feature in enabling parallel test execution on multiple servers, in a distributed environment. All key notes sessions brought great wisdom, understanding and appreciation to many new perspectives much to the delight of the participants

2) Invigorating Panel discussions: This was an excellent feature during the conference and felt both panel discussions made a profound impact, putting across some incredibly compelling points. Day 1 featured ‘Women Leadership Panel Discussion – Bridging the gap for women leadership at organization level’ was a brilliant conversation with achievers from the world of technology Anjana Kaladhar, Asmita Parab, Veena Murthy, Priya Tandon and Nalini Kannan – they reflected on the current situation for women in technology world in a highly engaging manner. Day 2 featured a discussion on the topic ‘Codeless Automation – is it a FAD?’ with panelists Brijesh Deb, Shawn Jaques, Kushan Amarasiri, Shriram Krishnan, Aditya Garg – they debated on the pros and cons of tools which do not require coding to perform test automation making hard-hitting points from both sides of the argument. The panel discussion on both days felt highly thought provoking, with excellent moderators on both sessions

3) Informative Track sessions: The track sessions had a range of topics to choose from, right from defect management to stadium experience, a brilliant spectrum of topics was covered. While it was a difficult decision to choose from multiple, parallel tracks, each one of them brought a unique experience. I attended a session on ‘AI in testing-Why: Idea whose time has come’ by Adish Apte and Meena Malu who gave an excellent account of how employing AI is an important and value added. The session ‘Spice up your Testing Gamify it out!’ by Geosley Andrades was a revelation in understanding how gamification can improve engagement of testers and team members in a project. ‘Taking biases into account: Why retrospectives promise more and deliver less’ by Deepak Koul had deep insight into how human biases can impact and limit retrospection. Later in the day ‘Follow a Tweet – BigData Pipeline Testing’ by Rashmi Konda and Dimpy Adhikari proved to be a comprehensive session on big data testing. while ‘Chaos engineering: Break it to make it’ by Anupam Agarwal and Peeyush Girdhar gave a narrative of how to perform resilience testing effectively. ‘Break the Enigma for Better Customer Experience’ by Anish Muralidharan, Praveen Appadurai drew parallels from a World War II espionage techniques to creating test data. The session ‘ Stadium Experience Assurance’ by Vinod Antony, Senthilkumar Thirumalaisamy was about testing cutting edge technologies like Augmented reality and virtual reality. The sessions having been recorded is a reassuring factor as I felt curious about all the talks listed in this year’s schedule

4) Fantastic Lab sessions: Delivering learning content of incredibly high order, the sessions came across to be very well prepared, deeply thought through these sessions delivered high value hands-on knowledge to the participants. The lab session ‘The Know-Hows in Resilience & Reliability Testing for building an anti-fragile & highly scalable system’ was brilliantly run by Ramya Moorthy and Sai Sivasailem demonstrating an excellent session on how to develop a resilience culture to experiment and fail fast, early in the life cycle and implement chaos testing/engineering activities as a part of delivery pipeline. Also covering aspects like provisioning a robust observability platform with intelligence (AI/ML) to aid improvement in the system resiliency, also touched upon aspects like managing SLOs, in complex high-availability requirements. The second session I attended was ‘How to automate desktop applications using Open-source tool Python – PyWinAuto’ by Senthilkumar Thirumalaisamy and Sophia Raphael was a comprehensive session on using Pywinauto and PyTest to perform desktop automation. Through an excellent demo on how to create test scripts to automate desktop applications, the session went on to provide an insight into how to integrate with cloud providers using Azure DevOps.  Finally, ‘Accessibility testing’ session by Karthikeyan Balasubramanian was masterfully crafted session which delivered a highly comprehensive knowledge sharing on accessibility testing, the relevant background around standards, laws, and the best practices. The session then provided an in-depth demo of running accessibility tests and recognizing the errors. The preparation and thought which had gone into each of these sessions was commendable and the audience benefited from them immensely.

5) Great audience engagement: Ahead of the conference, participants had excellent options to engage with the event like blogging competition BlogATAhon2021 and another interesting competition of curating Selenium based test automation quiz title SelQurATAhon2021. At the event the audience had exciting opportunities like live quiz competitions, best selfie, best tweet and much more. It was great to see audience enthusiasm and sportive spirit in participation. It made the conference a lively experience for everyone. In each session there were excellent moderators to ensure audience questions were being addressed. The attention to detail in every aspect of event organization was simply outstanding, making it incredibly engaging for the participants. The energy across the organizers as well as participants was palpable despite the virtual format, and it was heartening to see testers interact in their best communicative spirit.

As the year’s activities concluded, there was a feeling of having been invigorated and intellectually stimulated with amazing ideas. Behind this enormous undertaking was an extraordinary conference team, an army of dedicated people who stood behind this event with an incredible level of commitment to make this experience engaging and fruitful for all participants. In the days of pandemic where the possibilities of human interaction are full of challenges, this virtual event beat the odds and brought people together to learn, celebrate and rejoice. Kudos to the entire team of ATAGTR 2021 who tirelessly worked to bring this together for the community.