26 July 2024
This week, our team were pleased to attend the National Software Testing Conference (NSTC) in London. The event featured brilliant speakers, inspiring leaders, and thought-provoking discussions on key topics such as the unrivalled importance of quality, the opportunities available when leveraging AI for testing purposes, and the need to nurture a culture of quality across entire organisations. We met testing experts and practitioners from across multiple industries, each bringing a fresh perspective on how their sectors and organisations view and prioritise quality. The breadth of interesting presentations, speakers and seminars made for a fascinating 2 days, and reminded us of some really fundamental principles that are important to remember when caught in the slip-stream of “doing”. The 3 most important reminders that we took away were: Quality is subjective : Quality means different things to different people. It's crucial to define whose perspective on quality you are prioritising — whether it's the stakeholders, customers, or another party. Testing professionals are the best safeguard of quality : The human eye and the trained skill set of testing professionals are always the most reliable protectors of quality. Quality is a habit, not a one-time act : Quality must be consistently prioritised and integrated at all levels. It’s not a checkbox activity to be completed and forgotten. Not only did we attend, but our very own Zanoo leadership was invited to speak at the conference. Trudi Flanagan, our CEO, marked the 7th anniversary of Zanoo by delivering a talk titled ‘The Importance of Listening, Learning, and Advising as a Test Consultancy CEO.’ In her session, Trudi shared insights from her personal journey in serving clients since the company’s inception. Trudi’s talk highlighted the intersection between delivering high-quality testing services, all the while providing expert advisory and consultancy based on in-depth functional and industry experience. Our clients rely on us to listen to the challenges they are facing regarding testing and quality assurance, learn about their business and customers to problem-solve and co-create testing solutions that will address these matters, and provide trusted, expert advice that is tailored to meet their needs. Suhas Sukumar also presented a deep dive into Quality Engineering in the FinTech sector. In an industry where regulatory complexity, data confidentiality, and transaction efficiency are crucial, thorough testing of banking solutions is essential to ensure that quality, security and performance is ingrained throughout. Suhas outlined several key testing elements in FinTech, including: transaction scalability testing, compliance and regulatory testing, payment gateway testing, and batch process testing. He also discussed the key benefits of employing quality engineering in FinTech, such as improved automation efficiency, repeatability of tests, extensibility of multiplicative factor tests, and the longevity of automation tests into Business-As-Usual (BAU) processes. This conference serves as a great reminder of the incredible talent within the testing industry and the exciting opportunities on the horizon. We’re already looking forward to next year’s event.