Stretch and SAST Örebro at SAST Värmland's Q4 meeting

SAST Värmland - a local association within the Swedish Association for Software Testing (SAST) - has held the last Q meeting of the year in Vincontoret's premises on Kasernhöjden in Karlstad with Stretch as host and Björn Kinell from SAST Örebro as guest speaker.

Urban Andersson, Mikael Sjöö, Annicka Rosengren and Mathias Carling (Stretch) and Björn Kinell (SAST Örebro).

The host company Stretch began with Mathias Carling welcoming and Annicka Rosengren presenting Atlassian as a company and the tools they develop. 

Annicka Rosengren demonstrated JIRA Agile, an add-on for JIRA that provides system support for Agile projects, simplifies sprint planning, implementation, testing and follow-up of activities for the Agile team. Here you get help to create and estimate user stories, build and manage sprint backlog, identify the team's velocity, visualize team activities and report the team's progress. You can extract various reports such as burndown charts, detailed bug fixes, requirements/user stories and you can easily create retrospective reports in Confluence. In JIRA Agile there are digital boards for cross-functional teams and you get the opportunity to work from different locations with joint activities, it is the collaboration platform for Scrum and Kanban teams.

Annicka Rosengren also presented JIRA Capture where you can create and share test sessions. It supports exploratory testing right in your browser, and you can create improvement suggestions and bug reports with screenshots and browser information. In addition to these tools, Annicka showed a film about how to integrate with a build server and achieve continuous integration with the help of a short film about Atlassian's build server Bamboo's JIRA integration. With its open API, you can also connect JIRA to test management tools such as Zephyr, which Annicka showed through a video clip about how the connection between Zephyr enterprise and JIRA works.

See Annica's presentation >>

"How to get good at tests - fast"

After a short leg stretcher and a little refill of coffee, it was time for the second speaker of the day – Björn Kinell (pictured) from SAST Örebro. Björn presented his own story under the heading "How to Get Good at Tests FAST!"

It was a journey that many of us probably recognize, but perhaps have never analyzed and put into words the journey the way Björn did here. Björn told about his journey; from having been a developer for ten years, he decided to focus on testing. He invested his own money, took four courses in six months and found that he had learned nothing - so what was wrong? He searched online, asked people, joined SAST and now it turned around! He found the motivation and got a fresh start when he found people with the same vision, learned a lot, had fun and found his passion in the test.

Björn Kinell emphasized that it is about constantly learning, such as learning new businesses, users, stakeholders as well as test design and approach to solving the tasks. The key to that is to maintain a high level of learning using motivational factors, inspiration, personal goals and an understanding of how the brain works in learning and concentration to maintain the level of learning at all times.

Follow your energy, alternate - let your curiosity guide you, scout and have your own list (with things you want to learn more about) to choose from, and dare to choose what you most want instead of what you most need and alternate with the "must" to maintain the level of learning. Dare to question to gain depth and provoke "great minds"! Alternate with critical and lateral thinking, find a mentor or start a small group where you can inspire each other and where you dare to question and be questioned to inspire new ideas.

SAST Värmland is a local association within the Swedish Association for Software Testing (SAST) – a non-profit association for anyone interested in software testing. The association's purpose is to create forums where the association's members can exchange experiences; offer networking opportunities; promote development in software testing; promote the skills development of the association's members. SAST Värmland was formed in 2010 and today has more than 100 members.

To become a member of SAST Värmland, you must be registered as a member of SAST (do it here: http://www.sast.se/registration.jsp) and register with the board of SAST Värmland (do it via email to varmland at sast.se) so that you are included in the local mailings made to members. The board is happy to receive tips and requests about themes for upcoming meetings, speakers or if your company is interested in sponsoring a Q meeting.