QA: Challenge Accepted is a conference targeted towards enthusiasts, specialists and managers participating in software testing and software quality assurance. The event is initiated by the QA community in Bulgaria - for professionals from professionals.
After five successful editions, QA: Challenge Accepted 6.0 will bring you more enjoyable experiences and the opportunity to obtain new knowledge, skills, contacts, ideas and approaches, while remaining true to our core principles:
You will be able to attend all of the lectures without having to worry that you can miss out on a topic that you find interesting.
Some of the best professionals in the sector will present interesting and actual problems in QA (as well as their solutions) with real, practical usage.
Besides the technical part of the conference, you can expect show, games and surprises.
After the end of the event we will gather for a few beers, joyful conversations and endless opportunities for networking.
The first topic will uncover some practical ideas on how to build a highly productive and efficient team based on number of qualities. Nicky is part of the HYPE since its creation, and he is going to share facts related to the team work, the attitude, the productive environment and many other key takeaways in the last two years.
Nikolay is QA Architect at Isobar, having more than 11 years of experience at the IT sector. For the last 7 years he is responsible for building automation frameworks from scratch supporting the needs and the high demand of the ecommerce sector. His current project is the sport giant – adidas, where Nicky implemented an automation framework, helping to achieve daily releases goals. In addition to his project responsibilities he devotes time to expanding the test automation knowledge at the company believing automation skills are for each person who wants to acquire them.
We will continue with talk about processes and one of the dilemmas that many teams in many companies are struggling with. Nevena will share the experience of various teams, how they approached the challenges together, action steps, practical examples and lessons learned through the whole journey.
Nevena Marinova has 15+ years of experience in the QA field. She has climbed the whole career ladder from Tester to QA Manager, being part of OBS, Questers, Fish4 and Milestone Systems. In addition to her technical expertise with TFS, Selenium, Ranorex, Bugzilla, TNR, Test Director, and more, Nevena has built and grown a successful QA team from scratch and is very proud with her colleagues and the quality they are achieving together. In her spare time she loves travelling and diving.
Are your testing and quality assurance activities adding significant value in the eyes of your stakeholders? Do you have difficulty convincing decision-makers that they need to invest more in improving quality? Selecting metrics that stakeholders understand may improve your project in many aspects. Anton Angelov will present a story of how his teams managed to adopt a more in-depth bug workflow - from noticing the bug to the triage process and metrics boards. There will be a real-world example of how to collect essential QA metrics from Jira, using Azure Functions and visualizing them through charts in Azure Power BI. At the end of the presentation, you will have many ideas on how you can optimize your existing defect management through new statuses, practices and monitor it through quality metrics, which can help you to improve your software development and testing further.
Anton Angelov is CTO and Co-founder of Automate The Planet Ltd, one of the world's most popular blogs for quality assurance and automated software testing. He is also an inventor of BELLATRIX Test Automation Framework and MEISSA Distributed Test Runner, speaker at various conferences, and also a winner of QA of the Year Award. Anton has a significant experience in automated testing, working as QA architect in Telerik and Progress, and is welcomed again to our stage to tell us about metrics.
If you ever wanted to start doing API automation but never had the time before, Karate DSL is definitely an option worth considering. Karate DSL motto is "Test automation made simple". It is easy indeed, as all you need to start is downloading a VS Code extension and the Karate .jar (it’s Java based), then write your future automated tests and hit "Run". Plamen will help us understand some of Karate DSL most powerful capabilities, such as matching complex JSONs, data-driven features, schema validation and fuzzy matching. He will also show us a real-world implementation.
Plamen is a QA Lead at Genius Sports, actively contributing in two UI Automation frameworks using Selenium with .NET running on all popular platforms (including performance testing on mobile phones), an API automation solution with Karate DSL, and performance testing with Gatling. Plamen likes to keep an open mind for the technology stack of the automation in order to choose the best tool for the situation at hand. In his current role he is the stakeholder for quality for six development teams in Sofia and is the lead of four QAs.
For first time at QA: Challenge Accepted we will dive in the world of automotive. Antoaneta will brief us about car architecture, communication buses (CAN, LIN, FlexRay, Automotive Ethernet), standards and processes that we need to be aware of. As the automotive area is part of the embedded world, we will also learn about the challenges, such as physically testing in a car, keeping hardware limitations in mind, as well as some of the testing tools used.
Antoaneta Antova-Georgieva is a Department Manager, responsible for System Verification & Validation at the first Bosch Engineering Center Sofia. She is part of SW/Sys testing for more than 15 years. Behind her back, she has many successfully finished projects for almost all OEMs, connected with different ECUs (Clusters, Displays, Self-Parking systems, Front cameras, etc.). Automotive is her passion and she will show us a little bit of the beauty and inspiration which Automotive can bring to each Test Engineer.
Trends show that Internet of Things grows by 30% every year worldwide, rеaching up to 25 billion(!) devices till 2025. This means that many of the current testers will very soon start their adventure with real hardware devices. It also means that more and more complicated integration with modern services and technologies such as Amazon DRS, Alexa, Behavioral Recognition, vision processing, AI, ML and many more is expected. What are the limitations encountered in such conditions? What are the main challenges and what a modern tester should know before they start their testing game? Why we should focus on safety aspects? And finally, how to find yourself in a testing environment when Time to Market statement has paramount importance in terms of building business models? Dawid will focus on the current challenges and risks coming in the near future and how to deal with them to avoid a safety headache. He will also present the way to easier identify and mitigate them. All of that in the context of pet cameras, snack launchers, and lasers, or in other words - IoP (Internet of Pets) world. All dogs and cats are warmly welcomed during his talk.
Dawid Pacia is 1/3 QA, 1/3 DevOps and 1/3 Team Lead. He also describes himself as tech freak following all the newest technologies (and also implementing some on his own). Dawid is a huge fan of agile approach to project management and products. He is actively speaking and traveling around the world. David has also received "People of Testing" award in 2018 & 2019, and he is organizer of QA meetups.
How do you make a product inclusive? How do you ensure that users will have equal access to your creation? You need accessibility testing! In this session, Lena will present an overview of accessibility testing and demonstrate why everybody needs to be aware of it. We will look at some useful tools for easy manual testing, and also show how to automate these kinds of tests.
Lena Konstantynova is a Quality Analyst Consultant at ThoughtWorks Germany. She has experience in consulting and coaching as well as the creation and integration of software in various domains, ranging from retail to tourism, e-commerce and warehouse management. Lena is focused on various testing activities, producing detailed documentation, driving higher team productivity using agile methodologies, and knowledge sharing. Lena also has experience working in a startup environment, as well as being part of corporate and distributed teams. Lena is an active participant in various technical conferences and meetups. Out of the QA field, Lena acts in the theatre and listens to post-rock songs.
This talk will be in Bulgarian. Despite the super-unprofessional title, Nedko will describe how he prepared himself in the last two years to speak at some of the best IT conferences in Bulgaria, sharing some lessons learned about the acquired black magic for conducting live coding, overcoming the fear of public speaking, dealing with panic attacks on the stage, etc.
Nedko Hristov is at the QA field for more than 10 years and currently scratching the surface of the DevOps field. His main interests are infrastructure and security. Nedko is also a blogger and writes about QA, performance and security. In addition to all of that, he is also long-distance cycling and participates to different adventures like lecturing at universities, conferences and sometimes even as a motivational speaker and writer. He considers that one of his biggest achievements is that he was not kicked out of the stage the last two times he spoke at QA: Challenge Accepted.
A series of short presentations with a maximum duration of 5 minutes where every conference participant can speak from the stage by registering on the day of the event.
Official award ceremony and announcing the name of the winner
Raffle from the sponsors' games and official closing of the event.
After the end of the event we will gather for fabulous cocktails, joyful conversations and endless opportunities for networking.
Candy Crush Saga is one of the biggest mobile games today that has been around for 7 years. It is increasingly a challenge to test a game that has technical debt combined with new features being added for millions of players. Alex will show us how King is training artificial intelligence (AI) programs (bots) to test its games by mimicking human players. Join Alexander as he discusses how King is taking testing to the next level by using machine learning to train bots to test and evaluate game feature in an unsupervised scalable way. He discusses ways to extend and use AI bots to test parts of code that normally is a challenge to tackle as human tester. Alexander explains how this AI approach can be generalized to test other applications.
Alexander is the agile testing lead for Sweden-based King/Midasplayer AB, developer of the popular mobile game Candy Crush Saga. He has worked on multiple complex test projects ranging from using session-based test management for quality assuring MED-Tech devices for life critical systems to establishing a world class approval process for Spotify apps used by Fortune 500 companies. Now he teams with developers in testing big data, business analytics, and game level regression testing using AI.
With this talk Petros will give an introduction to the concept of the Timings API that has been developed by GoDaddy. Most testing teams follow a CI/CD process where Selenium is commonly used for test automation. Selenium WebDrivers provide access to the same APIs as real browsers, including the widely supported W3C performance API. Using Timings API, one can insert some JavaScript code into the WebDriver object, performance data can be collected and posted back to the webservice. The response from the webservice includes a boolean field that testers can use for assertion - just like they would with functional checks! The field indicates whether performance was above/below the baseline.
Petros Plakogiannis has graduated the University of Piraeus and the Technological Educational Institute of Crete. He has been working professionally as a software tester for 11 years, with strong focus on automated testing using various tools like QTP and Selenium. He also has a significant experience in white box testing, application testing (desktop, web and mobile), and security testing. Petros is also the main organizer of the Ministry of Testing Athens meetups.
This full day workshop teaches testers the basics of Exploratory Testing and how to apply more advanced approaches and techniques in your daily work. Entirely oriented towards exercises and real-world scenarios and examples.
Super Early Bug tickets are on sale
Call for speakers, sponsors, volunteers
Nominations for QA Award are opened
Early Bug tickets are on sale
Standard Bug tickets are on sale
Last chance to apply as a speaker
The conference agenda becomes public Workshops announced
Deadline to become a sponsor or partner of the event
QA Award nominations end
The new date is 12 September 2020
We will try to update it ASAP but no later than this date
Deadline to vote for the QA Award
Last chance to purchase a ticket for the event
Tickets are subject of availability
Deadline for requesting a ticket refund
The big day of the event
Workshop Day
One of the best experts in the field of test automation, who contributed to the QA community with over 200 articles and numerous lectures around the world. Developed two advanced automation projects - MEISSA and BELLATRIX. Author of one of the most widely read automation testing blogs - Automate The Planet, counting over 2.2 million readers and over 300,000 subscribers worldwide for the past two years. In 2019, his site was pointed as one of the best and most useful online testing resources. Anton has been nominated during the all four years, and won the award in 2018.
An unorthodox software testing thinker with a context-driven mindset. Tester, blogger, teacher and conference speaker. During the past few years, he delivered various talks at local and international tech conferences. His talk "Worst practices in software testing" was listed among the 20 most viewed videos of all time on Ministry of Testing Dojo platform. Viktor teaches software testing in academy called Pragmatic. He is a Senior Software Engineer in Test and QA Lead at Clippings, where he is responsible for support and development of their automation framework, as well as establishing QA culture companywide.
QA architect and freelancer with a decade of experience in automated testing. Worked for global companies at the top of the Fortune 500. Also a creator of the JIRA Exploratory Testing Plugin and the Human-driven Testing Framework, spoke at a number of IT events and conferences. Provided trainings for beginners as well as for advanced testing specialists. Evgeni was also nominated for the award in the last year edition of the conference in 2019.
