Our on Delex: how was the first DevOps and advanced Test Automation conference held in Minsk

“We have something to tell the world about Belarusian DevOps,” they said. “The testing infrastructure is changing and a turnaround will happen soon. We need a platform to communicate with the right practitioners, ”they said. They said - they made Delex. And another 300+ people came to listen to the reports, to meet and witness the birth of a new technological community. There were EPAMers there: they were on the program committee, read reports and presented new developments.



All newcomers to Delex had a hard time. The conference brought together senior and senior + specialists. This was the calculation of the organizers - to enable engineers with a high level of expertise not only to share knowledge, but to meet like-minded people. Discussion of the reports began in the halls, flowed into the halls and continued to the after-party. But first things first.

Dmitry Gumenyuk, conference organizer :
“For the last 2 years I have spoken a lot abroad, and our speakers with a very high level of knowledge and expertise in DevOps and Test Automation have spoken at conferences around the world, but not in Minsk. We are quite strong technical leaders, but we are not able to show it. It would be desirable that after the conference we would not just “sit down and leave,” but continue to hold meetings, exchange ideas. ”

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Speakers simultaneously performed at 4 sites. In one of the halls, Victor Vedmich presented the report “DevOps in Multi vendors Enterprise”. When the development team rolls over 30 people, you need to come up with new approaches. Our colleague talked about his experience in implementing DevOps on projects of various sizes and practices that give the best result.

Victor Vedmich :
“The three main points of my report can be described as:

1. SAFe (Scale Agile Framework) and how DevOps participates in this.
2. Release Train: how it works. The path from the basics to complex implementation with examples.
3. ITIL is the best way to codify business processes by implementing adaptations to suit your needs. ”

Dmitry Gumenyuk began his report with the words hype and trend. And, indeed, speaking of "The use of machine learning and neural networks in test automation" is difficult to resist the newfangled epithets - these technologies are at the peak of popularity.



Dmitry Gumenyuk:

“Machine learning is a cool screwdriver, but it doesn’t solve all the issues. The direction of the new, little mastered and in the report I wanted to show in which directions I “dug”, what conclusions I did, what worked and what didn't. ”



Trace the evolution of DevOps, as well as learn more about the transformation into a service-oriented model, the possibilities to make automation more resilient to external circumstances, and the team’s interaction is more efficiently described by Nikolay Stakhanov in the SOA Approach to Automation Development report.

The immediate future of DevOps, according to Nikolai, looks like this:

"one. DevOps will become service oriented and more modular. Due to the service approach to each component management and infrastructure will become more flexible.
2. DevOps will change in its essence: the engineer will not need to have any information about the systems, he will be skilled enough to navigate in the world of services and services: cloud and local, skillfully connecting them into a single release. ”

Both the participants and the organizers talked a lot about the interactive and new communication formats during the conference: in the SLACK chat they played gifts, the Telegram channel gave news bulletins during the conference. Do not stay aside from the interactive trends and speakers. The report by Anna Chernysheva and Alisa Demennikova “BDD Automation puzzlers” was completely focused on communicating with the audience.



Having spent a small quiz with the audience, Anna and Alisa spoke in detail about the cones stuffed with certain frameworks, sorted out unexpected situations related to using BDD, and also dwelt on the strengths and weaknesses of JBehave and Cucumber.

Anna Chernysheva :

“Such communication is very important for understanding that certain difficulties, problems and mistakes when working with different tools are always there and this is normal. For example, we have a report that deals with the situation when in Cucumber we can pass steps directly through the examples table. And in JBehave so impossible. So, to tell about such things, we did the jigsawners and analysis of these two tools. ”

The conference does not end behind the doors of the halls, but is just beginning. The main networking is happening on the stands of the partners between the reports. At the EPAM site, Andrey Petrashkevich presented the development of the company in the field of manual and automated testing "Mobile Farm". There were many people who wanted to harvest a lot - this solution allows you to test Web, Native and Hybrid mobile applications remotely on iOS or Android platforms using a Web browser or Appium. Colleagues talked about the possibilities of emulating GPS, Chrome web debug, rotation, complex gestures, screenshots, crash logs and logs from devices in real time. In EPAM, the farm is used to perform auto tests in parallel, test Apple pay and many other interesting tasks.

Andrei Petrashkevich :
“Everyone knows that mobile projects are short-term and long-term. We were interested in how well manual testers and automation devices use devices effectively. For example, the working day is 8 hours, and the device is used only by 30-40 percent. And if the phone or tablet was available to other testers at that time, it would be used more efficiently. In EPAM, it works twice as efficiently: when Minsk sleeps, colleagues from the US work and it turns out to be cross-use. To create a solution that is available 24/7, so that the devices do not fail, is quite difficult. And we succeeded. Statistics show, to be sure that your application will work on 80% of devices on the market, for example, the United States, you need to check it on 134 mobile devices. Agree that not every project team has the possibility of such a purchase. ”

The first Minsk Delex conference immediately became international, gathering guests from Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania. Silver partner of the conference was the company EPAM.