It was just another Delhi afternoon, as I was taking a break from the end to end batches from the starting of this year that I received a phone call from Manjula,  to participate as a jury for the DSTC conference being held in Gurugram. I got excited at the opportunity because of the names associated with this platform. Also I would get a chance to meet them. Also there was a challenge to act as a jury for the 21 teams participating in a TestAutoThon which was to be held on 25^th -26^th of April at Nagarro.

So the day arrived and I met other jury members, all highly experienced then me. I still feel humbled enough, to be a part of their team and how kind and friendly everyone was towards me. The Jury were, Ritu Arora Director Engineering Aricent, Hemanshu Singh Sr. Delivery QA Manager DMI, Vinay Agarwal Sr. Manager Quality Engineering Tavant Technologies, Nitin Mukhija VP Engineering PayU and Saurabh Bansal Founding Member BigPhi.  

When we reached the venue, the participants were already there ready for challenge. It was great to see such an enthusiastic crowd. Organizations like Exl, Cvent, Sopra Steria, Thales[earlier Guvavus], Fidelity, Nagarro, Natwest, Cygnet, Optum, Sunlife, S&P Global, Century Link, Sapient participated in the Testautothon.  Each group had close to 5-6 people.  

The event moderation was started by Rahul Verma, who first showed everyone sitting in the audience a mirror to which I believe most of us would like to close their eyes to, but I guess high time we act upon his words. Listening to Rahul in person was also one of my professional bucket list task which got checked with this conference, so i guess gratitude to stepin forum people who invited me. After welcoming the audience, he shared the question which was going to test audience on their skill of automating a problem statement, including their devops skills. It was a cool problem designed by the team, and everybody was free to use any approach, tool, framework etc whichever they could make it work in the three hour time slot. 

We then as a jury team were taken into another room, and were guided towards our role and expectations from us. Rahul patiently explained us the do’s and don’ts leaving us with enough freedom of expression.  From those 21 teams, we had to filter out 10 teams which would present the next day to the jury and from those 10 we would be required to shortlist the winner and runner up. Our criteria was simple – “Solve the Damm Problem”.  Choosing the 10 took us all close to 2 hours where we all divided as group of two, but then we all decided to have a wild card entry. A bunch of freshers who had 80% of the problem solved impressed us with their dedication and made the team 11. 

The Day 2 started in a conference room of Nagarro. I was very impressed by their organization of the conference, management in spite of it being a working day. One by one each team came in and showed us their solution. It was a great learning experience to watch so many different approaches to solve the same problem, usage of different programming languages, approaches, tools, technologies and architecture diagrams. After each team went, we had our own brainstorming session, and there was a timer reminding us all to keep a tab on time, we didn’t have the whole day in our hands. 

But in the end we had to shortlist to 2 teams. I would be honest in here the jury was divided in the end. It was 1:4 for one of the team, and we had two winners which totally deserved the win. Cvent as winners and team Guavus now Thales as runner up.  I won’t forget the look on the faces of the Cvent team, all were having less than a year experience. They were almost to tears and were shivering as old leaves in the wind. I guess that’s what unexpected happiness looks like when it comes from sheer hardwork and teamwork. Kudos to you all!

As jury we got a chance to listen to some speakers in the second half of the conference. Details of which are here - https://dstc.stepinforum.org/#program. I heard the Testers and Testing panel discussion where two points from the panel are etched in my mind. Testers need to learn coding, and at the same time not lose their domain expertise and thinking abilities. The concept of MaDness  has to be followed, where M is the mindset and D is the domain. Aim towards fullstack qa engineers role.  We also had a fun section by Ramit. We played technoantakshri, which indeed lightened up everyone’s mood. Audience were pretty creative I must say in here. 

In the end the wrap up section by Vipul Kocher  summed up our thoughts. We as testers are not to lose our thinking abilities, the more complex AI world is coming the more human creativity will be required to test it. It was short and impactful.  The entire conference, management, bringing such a great gathering in Delhi was indeed a humungous task. And a special thanks to Vinay Baid from Verity Software for making me feel invited and part of it. Thanks a lot Vinay and everyone at StepIn.