Big conference for big team

The idea of the first Teamwork Skill Up Conference was born suddenly.

Our team is very large and diverse. We work together as one unit with developers, testers, and business analysts. These interesting and challenging projects are tested manually and are being automated. We have a lot of competence in different spheres.

And on this beautiful autumn day, we were mature enough to share our knowledge and experience with the whole department.

When organizing, we tried to consider and apply all the best conference practices. There were 90 acquaintances, 10 of whom were speakers.

The organizers were happy. The most important thing was that they were not bound by the list of topics and speakers. We were just looking for people who wanted to share something.

The conference day

Saturday morning of December 3rd began with snowfall. However, rather than being frustrated by this “unplanned event,” the snow added an element of warmth and comfort to our congregation.

The themes of the reports were very different. We started with Scrum of our projects, then moved on to the most successful practices of communication with customers. We talked about the following topics among others:

• good and bad overtimes;
• the software development process from the analyst perspective;
• features of JUnit Rules;
• the assembling process of our huge and complex project;
• what is Web Accessibility and how to test it;
• “Beginners. What do they think, but don’t tell about?”

Each report uncovered something new, even though the subject seemed so familiar. These topics and the lively discussion about them developed solidarity and transparency between all of us. We could speak about ourselves, about the people with whom we spend at least eight hours every day, and not just about the processes, products, and technologies.

Our conference ended with summing up the results of teamwork in 2016.
We’d like to organize a team meeting in the same format next year. But maybe, we could meet more often! ;)

Afterword

We would like to say a big thank you to NIX Solutions for the opportunity to hold this necessary and important event! With this tech-org-support, organizing our large conference was an elementary thing. :)