The Association of Nigeria Software Testers, (ANST), will be hosting the third edition of their conference on Saturday, December 8, 2018.
The members of the organizing committee have recognized that testers, typically, are not treated as part of the developer community. In a chat with the organisers, they said: “A lot of testers in our community do not get invited to hackathons, despite testing being such an important part of software development”. This is why one of the events planned is a ‘testathon’, which is like a hackathon, but for software testers, where contestants find bugs for prices. The contest requires participants to test programs against given parameters.
The team believes that though there are pockets of software testing experts in the country, many of whom work in banks and firms, the industry has not received the recognition it deserves. Ayo Adesokan, one of the members of the organizing committee for the conference, said during a chat session that a decade ago it was very hard for practitioners to say they were software testers. He said people found it hard to understand the importance of software testing in product development. “When it is considered, it usually comes as an afterthought,” he explained.
Today this trend is changing. With the kind of attention Nigerian software industry is getting around the world, the need to ensure quality is high. This has created a matching increase in the demand for quality assurance – the need that the product will work as developed irrespective of how the user is accessing the product. “There is a growing community of testers,” Adesokan continued,“ and that is why the association is using the conference as a medium to connect practitioners.”
In the software world, it is common knowledge that development is never finished. For example, users will always want new features to be added. Damola Tolani, another member of the organizing team, reinforced this point when he said, “ … as more apps are being built, as more websites are being developed, more bugs are found and more crashes are occurring.” It will tell a bad story on the part of software development companies if their products are not usable. Imagine if Andela were to develop software that breaks every minute.
This event also features the first election of members into the governing council of the organization. The elected members will be running affairs for a 2-year tenure.
It will hold at Vibranium Valley, the Ventures Garden Group’s hub for innovation and collaboration. You can visit the ANTS’ website to read more about the event and register.
