BrowserStack-San-Francisco-Meetup-4

On May 16th, we hosted the first ever BrowserStack meetup in San Francisco. The evening saw three hours of speakers' and networking session with 50+ automation engineers and developers as guests—some of them from BrowserStack's Bay Area customers like Twitter, Lyft, Square and more.

We brought insights from three brilliant QAs and a whole lot of pizza and craft beer to the table. Here's a short overview of what went down at the BrowserStack San Francisco Meetup.

Tl;dr

We had Ritesh Arora, co-founder and CEO of BrowserStack, kick off the evening with a quick story about BrowserStack's beginnings—how he, with co-founder and CTO Nakul Aggrawal, came up with BrowserStack in 2011—after being thoroughly frustrated by cross-browser testing. He went on to trace the journey to the present and emphasized the BrowserStack mission: empower teams to ship quality releases with confidence.

Next up was Lanette Creamer, Software Test Pilot at The Omni Group, who flew in from Seattle to talk about how QAs can ship faster—all the while juggling several smaller projects of varying deadlines.

Lanette used quirky artwork (and a slew of cat pictures) to drive home her insights about surviving chaotic QA schedules without compromising quality. Her talk had actionable tips and takeaways anyone can implement to practice lean agile thought and see smaller projects through.

Priyanka Halder, Head of Quality Engineering at GoodRX, flew in from Santa Monica to tell us how she managed to Tame the QA dragon. She talked about her experience as the first QA hire of her company and took the audience through what it takes to set up, run, and scale a fully-fledged QA function. Her talk emphasized some of her key findings: establishing a setup that's the best fit for an organization's scale and context, and how to gradually make the move to automation (hint: you get there by keeping testability front-and-center).

She shared her QA stack—so if you are in a similar spot and need inspiration, stay tuned to check out our blog post featuring Halder's talk.

Scaling to daily testing with BrowserStack at GoodRX
Stats from GoodRX's QA setup

We had Brian Lucas, senior staff software engineer at Optimizely, to talk about Optimizely's experiments with QA processes. More specifically, how Optimizely successfully eliminated the back-and-forth between the dev and test teams and made quality assurance a distributed role. He talked about scaling QA cleanly (with a complex product) and testing early, often, and with entire engineering teams as participants.

We also had TestHead Michael Larsen, who 'broke in' to the meetup and spent his time live-blogging the whole event.

That's all for today, folks. Stay tuned for more.