An international conference for
software testing and quality assurance

Hello, bugs!

An official opening of the conference.

So, you think you do quality assurance?

by Martin Chaov - Architecture Senior Manager @ Draftkings Inc.

Who is responsible for quality assurance or who executes the quality assurance function in the team? Are they doing quality assurance or quality control? Let's start the day with Martin, his software development experience, and where the bugs can hurt the most. Martin will point out the essence of QA and what kind of development process you need to deliver with minimum defects.

Martin has been working in the IT industry since 2006 and started sharing his experience on different topics at IT events in 2013. He has built several teams from scratch, and as a software architect and designer, he has won multiple awards for the best and most innovative products in the industry. Martin loves talking about architecture, principles for developing good software, CI/CD, effective teams, software design, performance, testing and quality of software systems, and many others.

Benefits of contract testing

by Dusanka Lecic - Test Lead / Department Manager @ Levi9 IT Services

Probably some of you hardly know anything about contract testing. It is not typical for most of our projects. Dusanka will tell us what it is, share her experience with contract testing, discuss its advantages and disadvantages, and show us real-life examples of contract testing and the differences between integration and contract testing.

Dusanka Lecic, Ph. D., is a highly motivated Test Lead. She was involved in many projects with different technologies for more than six years of experience in the Levi9 company. Her academic career is seventeen years long, and she published many scientific papers during this period and was a speaker at many conferences.

Top 10 Misconceptions in Performance Testing

by Nikolay Avramov - Automation Lead @ Automate The Planet

Performance Testing has become one of the hottest topics nowadays, where everything we do, everything we test, and everything we develop requires the speed of lightning and the endurance of an elephant. Nikolay will tell us about his challenges with the company’s software products being compared daily with the biggest players in terms of speed, reliability, and user experience.

Nikolay Avramov has 10+ years of experience as a Quality Assurance Engineer. He started his career in the field from ground zero - from taking part in the Telerik Academy to becoming a Principal QA Engineer, Trainer, and Consultant at the heart of any innovation or automation initiative. He found his true passion in Test Automation while looking for a ‘weapon’ to fight the tedious, non-productive daily tasks that a QA faces. By reducing the repeatable manual jobs, he believes that we can make the world a better place, full of happy and productive people ready to tackle the next challenging task instead of the next pile of test scenarios to cover by hand.

Why my Selenium Tests are Flaky

by Dimitar Topuzov - Senior Principal QA Engineer @ Progress

Flakiness is evil! It not only hurts your productivity but also causes a loss of trust among developers and testers. Dimitar will revile some of the most common reasons for flaky Selenium (and not only Selenium) tests and give tips on preventing flaky tests from appearing.

Dimitar has 15+ years of experience in quality engineering, with a strong focus on testing web, mobile, desktop, and backend systems. Passionate about building effective test automation and CI/CD processes, he has worked in companies with 20 to 2000 employees on many projects and has encountered software testing in all forms. A big fan of the Rhodopes and the Audi cars.

Continuous Testing at Scale

by Alexander Velinov - Head of Testing @ Endava

Alexander will share a potential testing approach and scalable automation frameworks and infrastructure that serve most modern micro-services and micro-frontend architectures. He will cover the must-have performance and security testing automation tests that should be part of our delivery process.

Alexander is passionate about software development and delivery and every single aspect related to how we build, deliver, support, and continuously improve any software and embedded solutions. Alexander has 20+ years of experience in software development and engineering web, mobile, embedded, and desktop solutions. Last ten years in leadership roles. Currently, he is leading the testing discipline of Endava in Bulgaria. He believes in the people and the technologies and that our IT community depends on every single IT professional to be the best they can be and to continue growing together with the brightest engineers.

How to manage the challenges of testing modern and complex driving assistants

by Achim Noller - Department Head @ Robert Bosch Gmbh

Achim will give us an insight into how modern driving assistants in the car will make the life of a driver easier and what is needed from a safety perspective to deliver excellent quality to all parties. A passion for cars is required, but what more? Join the session to find out!

Achim is one of the leading managers in Bosch in the sphere of ADAS testing. He is more than 20 years in the Automotive area and has vast experience in testing and developing safety braking systems, and ADAS systems, especially on central computing units. He has international experience setting Bosch office in Eastern Asia. Achim also supported the Board of Management as a Senior Expert on engineering topics. Currently, he is leading the Center of competence for ADAS testing on each level. Achim is passionate about sports such as biking, climbing, and skiing. He works very closely with Bosch Engineering Center Sofia and would like to share the latest trends in testing modern vehicles.

Switchboard: QAOps swiss knife

by Dmitry Gorbunov - Deputy Head of QA @ Devexperts

Large-scale and complex projects tend to have a diverse and ever-growing test base. As products cruise along the delivery waves, several challenges appear - risk-based testing approach, multi-criterion execution batching, or test base synchronization, to name a few. To overcome such challenges, one might have to fine-tune the execution scope. That's why Dmitry will tell us about Switchboard - a QAOps tool designed to help test leads and engineers manage tests and executions effectively.

Dmitry works for Devexperts as Deputy Head of QA and QA Automation Lead. During his 12+ years in QA and 8+ years in a leadership role, he has mainly focused on FinTech projects for big American brokers. Dmitry has shared his experience in several speeches at conferences and meetups. In his spare time, he writes electronic music.

Boost your automation analysis

by Nikolay Stanoev and Momchil Krastev - Members of the QA team @ Merkle

Automation analysis is an important activity in the daily routines of every QA Engineer. During the session, you will learn why automation analysis is essential and how to do it efficiently with the help of AI. The session will also include some personal feedback about the good and bad things about the tool and how its usage changes the analysis in Merkle.

Nikolay is QA Architect at Merkle, having more than 12 years of experience in the IT sector. For the last eight years, he has been responsible for building automation frameworks from scratch, supporting the needs and the high demand of the eCommerce sector. His current project is the sports giant – Adidas, where Nicky implemented an automation framework, helping to achieve daily release goals. In addition to his project responsibilities, he devotes time to expanding the company's test automation knowledge, believing automation skills are for each person who wants to acquire them.

With 5+ years of QA experience, Momchil has gained more and more traction in the field. For the past three years in the Clarins project, he's been digging more profound into the automation and security testing processes. With the experience, domain knowledge, and passion for teaching, Momchil participates actively in mentoring and onboarding newcomers and leading knowledge transfer sessions.

Be all ears! Active listening recipe

by Natalia Romańska - QA Engineer @ Brainly

Even though the importance of soft skills has started to be highlighted (and still is), one of the main reasons for conflicts and misunderstandings is the lack of communication. Developing soft skills in parallel with hard ones is crucial for growing up as a good specialist - no matter whether you are a Product Owner, Developer, QA, or someone from the non-IT industry. The sooner you will be training yourself there, the better! Which is pretty damnably hard. At the same time, soft skills - related topics are pretty often skipped or treated as something "obvious" - not worth studying or practicing! Which is tricky. So why don't we start once again from the basics? Let's take a look at the recipe. During this talk, Natalia will mix a pinch of what active listening is with an ounce of why it's worth practicing. Then, she'll add a spoon of its effect on developing other soft skills and improving (not only) workplace communication. In the end, she will put into the pot a few cups of tips and tricks for its daily basis usage. Et voila! The base of the cake for polishing mutual understanding in the workplace and not only - is ready! If you're interested in soft skills - that speech is for you. If you are not a fan of soft-skills-related topics - all the more, you should participate!

Natalia is a QA professional with over three years of experience. She comes from Krakow (Poland) and is a big fan of a holistic approach to Quality Assurance which starts from neatly designed processes. Transparent communication enthusiast, highlighting its importance in the workplace daily. Privately passionate about planning shorter or longer trips and crazy a bit about Friends, Harry Potter, and the perfume industry.

QA to QE transformation

by Nedko Hristov - Cloud and DevOps engineer @ Several Clouds

Spending years in the QA field sometimes feels exhausting. The logical path is to master new skills and become Automation QA. But what comes after that? What can make some of us happy again? Quality Engineer is a fresh new direction we can focus on. It's even more challenging because QE shifts left to the process of owning the product and its operations long before it's ready to be tested by the QA team. In this short lecture, Nedko will show you all the pros and cons to consider, some success stories, and a fresh new look at our career path.

Nedko Hristov is passionate about the quality of all its forms. He started "hundreds of years ago" at IT. He had some yay and nay stories to share, mostly had the experience from a first hand (note - do not, I repeat: do not make performance testing demo live, you'll thank me later). His experience starts as a QA and System Administrator and goes to a Cloud and DevOps engineer. He's mainly focused on AWS certifications these days. Huge motivation comes from success stories where everything starts from - "Guys, let's try this" and is later implemented into day-to-day processes. Knowledge sharing is the part of his job that he loves together with a "Getting things done" attitude (plus, please don't put this here, but dark humor and even worse - dad jokes), but do you know what he doesn't like? Deleting databases in production (been there, done that). Other conferences that he attended were 3 x QA: Challenge Accepted, Dev.BG and ISTA plus lots of time in local meetups. Nedko is a full-time father of (almost) two, a randonneur, and a lecturer in his free time.

Lightning Talks

A lightning talk is a short presentation lasting up to 5 minutes. If you would like to talk on any topic that might be interesting for the rest of the community, we invite you to sign up on the conference day and share your thoughts from our stage.

Closing Ceremony

Time for the QA award, an entertainment show, some raffle prizes from our sponsors, and the finale grande!