Tester of the Year with Szilárd Széll

[Szilárd] (0:03 - 0:10) I believe that DevOps will be extremely important and still important as the safety net for any AI-driven development. [Darren] (0:14 - 0:22) Welcome to the DevOps Sauna, the podcast where we deep dive into the world of DevOps, platform engineering, security, and more as we explore the future of development. [Pinja] (0:22 - 0:32) Join us as we dive into the heart of DevOps, one story at a time. Whether you're a seasoned practitioner or only starting your DevOps journey, we're happy to welcome you into the DevOps Sauna. [Darren] (0:37 - 0:49) Welcome back to the DevOps Sauna. Today, we have some exciting news to share with the community. One of our internal testers, Szilárd Széll, won tester of the year in Finland 2024. Welcome, Szilárd. [Szilárd] (0:49 - 0:51) Thank you for inviting me, Darren, and Pinja. [Darren] (0:51 - 0:55) And, of course, I'm here with my regular cohort, Pinja. [Pinja] (0:56 - 1:04) Hey, Darren, and welcome, Szilárd. We're very excited to have you here. And more importantly, congratulations on winning the award. This is amazing. [Szilárd] (1:04 - 1:12) Thank you so much. This means a lot to me. This is the voice of the community, and it's always good to know that you are doing something good. [Pinja] (1:12 - 1:26) Yes. You are a DevOps Transformation Lead and Quality Coach at Eficode, and we know that you work a lot with the quality community. But if you, in your own words, what is your history in quality? How did you end up where you are right now? [Szilárd] (1:26 - 2:42) Oh my, that's a long story. And it started quite many years ago. So originally, I got a diploma in software development, and I have the original education in programming and mathematics. And at the job fair, in the last year, there were a lot of companies approaching the new university guys, Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, a lot of big names in Hungary. And I went to every one of them, and I shared my CV. And it was Nokia who called me back first, and they proposed at the end of the interview, like, okay, so which type of job would you like to be? Do you want to be a software developer? Do you want to be a tester? I was like, well, until now, I studied development, but what is testing? And they said very quickly, like, okay, developers are going deep in these things, like components, et cetera. And the testers need to see the wide view of the system. I was thinking a bit like, okay, so going deep in one thing, seeing many things wider, hmm, let's be a tester. So that's how it all started back in 2000. The 15th of August, I started my career and profession as a software verification engineer at Nokia, Nokia Networks, important to say. [Darren] (2:42 - 2:52) It's kind of interesting. We're quite used to hearing the Nokia success stories inside Finland. So it's quite curious to hear that the reach was also further afield. [Szilárd] (2:53 - 3:33) Absolutely. I think the Budapest site was created in ‘98. So after two years, I joined, and that was kind of a time when hundreds of people were hired. So really, really big growth in that site. And we got an extremely good education from the Finnish community. So already by that time, I learned from the Finnish testers, the very heavy, very good and high quality processes of testing by Nokia. And honestly, I really admired that education, what I got already that time. And just recently, it turned out that I met the people who actually developed those processes that time. So it's so nice to close the loop after 25 years. [Pinja] (3:33 - 3:51) And this is a very interesting take. If we talk about the community around this, and you have gotten on stage many, many years ago, you've been part of the Hungarian Testing Board, the ISTQB, and that's where the community work has really started, right? [Szilárd] (3:51 - 5:39) Absolutely, absolutely true. So even, you know, back in Nokia, we were already doing small things within teams and between teams and educating. The big breakthrough for me to start the community work was in 2009, when I had my very first presentation on stage, we talked about test automation and configuration management, and test environments, sharing our way of working. And I met the Hungarian Testing Board representatives. And I asked, like, what is this thing? It was established just two years before that, 2007 and 2008. And they said, this is, you know, the representation of ISTQB, the International Software Testing Qualifications Board, which is certifying testers and building the testing profession around the world. And this community is just starting in Hungary. It's a non-for-profit organization with the aim to certify testers, but also bring together the community members, building the profession, actually. And they invited me to the next sessions they had, etc. And slowly I got more and more in that community, as much as somewhere around 2000, how was it? 12, we initiated our first meetup there. So testing meetup in Budapest, which started with a few sessions. And we worked on that with Attila Kovács and Tibor Csöndes, two very prominent figures of the Hungarian testing community. Now that meetup has more than 3000 participants, 3000 registered people in Hungary. That community has been ongoing and the events almost like every month happening ever since that, 12 years in the making and still growing. [Darren] (5:39 - 5:43) There's a lot of momentum behind the Hungarian testing community there. [Szilárd] (5:44 - 7:08) There is a lot and it's ever since growing. So, you know, if we look at the number of testers, there are more than 10,000 certified testers in the Hungarian area by the Hungarian testing board. And if you see that this is a 10 million country, it's quite a big number and also shows that the testing profession is strong in Hungary, mainly based on the large European companies who are there and very much, you know, bringing together again the different people, the community, sharing information and having nice things. And also during, I think it was 2011 when the very first Hungarian software testing forum, the local conference, HUSTEF was started in Hungary, which celebrates the 15-year anniversary this year. And that conference was also, I think I was there already from the second event and later on, becoming the organization committee head and working, you know, ever since that, working still in that conference as a review board member or etc., speaker on stage. But now this is like a 650-people conference, two days, bringing together people from 35 countries by now. And again, started those times. So it's like back to the community, like growing the community. These boards are not only focusing on certification, but bringing together the profession. [Pinja] (7:08 - 7:56) Let's talk about the community a little bit more, because your award as tester of the year in Finland was based on the votes from your peers, from the community. So this was like a recognition from your community to you that you've done a lot of good work. You've done quite a lot to take the community forward quite a lot. And this is a huge thing, you're saying, like the Hoosta, for example, it has grown quite a lot. All these events have grown a lot since the beginning of their being established, for example. So it is not just last year and 2024 when you got this award. And if we think of the role of nonprofit organizations, what do you think? What is the importance of having the NPOs in the game and building the community here? [Szilárd] (7:57 - 9:37) Before going into actually answering the NPO role, I would just jump back and say that, of course, what I described, these were all the things in Hungary that we started. But yes, I got the tester of the year award in Finland. And that's because I moved to Finland in 2018, moving my focus much more from building and working for the Hungarian community to the international community. And actually on that road, we started, I think, 2022 with my colleagues, Nina Perta, Jani Grönman, to build the Finnish software testing community. And the story started at a conference. I asked Martat Pyhäjärvi, like, Martat, do you know if there's any meetup after COVID, if people, the community is meeting? And she said like, well, not as I know, but why don't you start it? I give you an action point to start working on that. Now, it was nice. And she also said like, who would help Szilárd? And Nina and Jani immediately stood up. And ever since that, we are working on the local Finnish testing meetup group together, which again started in 2022. And by now, we have almost 700 registered participants with events every month. And I think, you know, this work was the one that brought me the award. This gave me visibility in Finland and also internationally, the noise we made about that, the speakers we brought in, the community who got the education month after month, and the platform to talk and share information or share their newest testing learnings and stories and achievements. [Darren] (9:38 - 9:59) I like hearing about communities being kickstarted after COVID. I think it was kind of detrimental to most of these communities, which is curious because they're technology communities, and we should all be able to work online. But there are a lot of security communities that haven't really bounced back after 2021. So, it's great to hear that the testing community is going strong. [Szilárd] (9:59 - 11:23) Absolutely, yes. And Pinja, you asked about the MPOs, the nonprofit organizations in this. I believe it's maybe the trust thing. There's a lot of meetups driven by different companies, right? But at the end, those are, well, around sales, right? That's why they put the energy. There is always some kind of other type of background or, how to say, some intent behind, which is not bad. And there are amazingly good meetups here in Finland anyway. But I believe when you have a non-for-profit organization, or just a set of people who are the focus is the community building itself, and there is no other goal, then that could build so much trust that the people are more willing to come and contribute. Now, in our case, we have no, absolutely no money. There is not even an organization. This is just a couple of people coming together. But we built the way that we ask a host, any company who wants to bring the community to their locations and their offices. And a host is just providing the place, providing some beverages, refreshments, and they are not allowed to speak because it's, I mean, they can introduce themselves, but they are not allowed to give a presentation because the point is that this is not a sales event. [Pinja] (11:24 - 11:46) Bringing the facilities does not give you speaking power, perhaps in a meetup. And I hear there's a lot of passion here in this community. And I think that's also what I've noticed and what I witnessed here from watching how the community has grown and how it's being led, that the passion element is a really strong driver here. [Szilárd] (11:46 - 12:09) Absolutely, yes. And I think we are growing in passion. So for example, lately Mikko Paloheimo from OP also joined us and he's driving the QA community within OP, within his company. And it's amazing to see that he's also now stepping out of his comfort zone, right, and doing work for the bigger community. [Darren] (12:09 - 12:50) It's actually kind of, I really like the idea that you just steal company premises and then don't let them talk. That entertains me. And it's kind of how these events should be because yeah, they so often devolve into sales pitches. I remember the Cyber Security Nordic last year was, unfortunately, just sales pitch after sales pitch. There was nothing of actually no, I think Trend Micro put on a small CTF, which was kind of entertaining, but outside of that, it was just big piles of sales pitches. So it goes back to something I talked about in The Future of Software, which was having these things owned and run by the community. [Pinja] (12:50 - 13:21) Yeah. And just like we are powered by Eficode, like we want to enable a community like this. We're not taking over, we're not taking the ownership of it, but we understand as a company that provides the facilities and the beverages and perhaps like all pizzas for the participants, understands that this is coming from the community. We're not taking over, we respect that. And that's what we see quite a lot is from the love of that community and the people around it. [Szilárd] (13:22 - 14:13) Absolutely like that. And I like the respect that we got from the hosts as well. I mean, no one tried to break the rules, right? But we always go with the flow as well. There's a lot of requests actually, like can we advertise open positions, for example. And to be honest, nowadays in these meetups, we have a lot of people who are looking for jobs. So we always say, yes, okay. Just on a high level, just say like, if you have something for the people, because it's for the benefit of the people, it's not only to learn new things, it's also to build the network, to build the relationship, to get the references and to get the chance to get a job or a new opportunity as well. But we try to be still careful so it shouldn't be also the kind of a job fair event. [Darren] (14:13 - 14:25) But maybe once we will create our own job fair. Did you have a contingency plan in case the host did start talking, like a fire extinguisher nearby that you could spray them with to get them off the stage? [Szilárd] (14:25 - 14:38) Well, you know, we are having three of our hosts typically, two or three of the hosts on this meeting and trust me, I can jump quickly and run quickly and be loud to stop people. [Darren] (14:38 - 14:42) Okay, so you're the contingency plan. That's good to know. All of us are. [Pinja] (14:42 - 15:14) We always love to see a good tackle from getting somebody off stage when they're not respecting the rules established by the community. So, I think that we talked about this in another context. And while we're planning for this discussion with you about the kind of the cornerstones of this passion and the community being led and when it comes to the purpose, autonomy, and mastery in your mind, what do these three words mean from your perspective on leading quality and the quality of community and quality practices forward? [Szilárd] (15:14 - 16:42) So, coming back to the base of the discussion, right, when we say that if you want to be professional in your work, or actually you want to be motivated in your work, you need purpose, you need autonomy, and you need mastery. And out of these three, I believe very much that the mastery itself, the way, the possibility to learn and to be the best or very good at mastering your profession is extremely important. And that bit is provided by continuous learning, availability to experiment, peers to learn from, so the network and the knowledge, and actually also interesting problems to solve. So not to repeat the same things all the time and again and again. So, in this mastery, the peers network is really much built by these communities. And for example, when you go to meet up, you can learn new things, you can meet new people, you can see new challenges. And typically the point is not only that here you learn, but you can reach out to these people later. And I think this is also very important that at a company, you build these communities of practices. Sometimes, there are secrets that you should not talk about outside of the company, right? But within the company, you can discuss and the community of practice can help you to have the mastery and to learn and to, you know, grow as a profession. [Darren] (16:42 - 16:54) That's kind of an interesting idea that the idea of mastery, if we think about it, how do you feel that weighs up against these cross-functional teams that we're starting to see a lot of? [Szilárd] (16:54 - 18:11) Well, this is something we discussed a lot, like being a generalist means that you might lose the deep professional understanding. And I'm a bit afraid, I'm a tester, so I'm afraid of things, right? I see risks everywhere, but not growing those, you know, I shaped or even with the T-shape, not growing that deep knowledge in certain areas might end up losing the knowledge. And also if you don't have this kind of very descriptive role, the question is like, do you feel that you own that profession? And then do you feel the need to support that profession and grow the profession back? So if you are in a cross-functional team, I still believe you need to have a strong leg in something. You could be the architect, you could be the security master, you could be the test master. Why knowing everything else, but somehow have a belonging to that profession more and, you know, like building that profession, bringing back value to the profession. So I hope that cross-functional teams will not, you know, kind of kill these things. And I hope that Generative AI will not kill these either. [Darren] (18:11 - 18:18) I mean, now you've pivoted there. I think we should move on to our favorite subjects that we can't seem to go an episode without mentioning. [Pinja] (18:18 - 18:49) No, this is such a huge disrupt in our area, in our industry. So, let's touch AI and quality for a moment. So the big question is, is it so that you are going to lose your job to AI? What do you think is the use of AI and the use cases in quality assurance? If we think of like, for example, agentic quality assurance, where can we build upon so that we are the masters of AI and we do not end up losing the jobs for AI here? [Szilárd] (18:49 - 20:16) Well, to be honest, a couple of weeks ago, we had even darker weather than now with the rain. And after not seeing the sun for two weeks and seeing all the AI news, I started to be a little bit pessimistic about my future, seeing how much these tools can help, how much these technologies can help, how many questions they can answer. Sometimes I felt like, oh my, oh my, oh my, what will happen to me in a couple of next years or maybe 10, 15 years. But then with, with, you know, again, talking to the community, discussing with some of the peers, we also stated like, yeah, the knowledge might be there, but who will ask the questions? Who knows what questions to ask and who knows how to interpret the answers? That's still important. And again, AI is just another tool, just like test automation did not steal the jobs of testers, but move the aspects a little bit differently. And also just open new horizons for, for, you know, people who had different needs. And by the way, I believe that we need test automation to give more time for in-person testing. Also, you could express that exploratory testing or manual testing, when it's you, the human, who needs to be there and see that something is good or bad. Now, also with Generative AI, I think it will help us a lot to give more time to focus on the exploration and the in-person testing. [Pinja] (20:17 - 20:37) I was aware of how populous perhaps my statement and my question was that was on purpose, just because we see that so many times and so often, for example, if we go on LinkedIn and somebody claims that, well, AI is not going to take your job, but it's all about us transforming, it's a tool, it's a sprinkle into what we're doing. [Darren] (20:37 - 21:10) Yeah. I don't think we're going to have much risk of ChatGPT being the 2025 Tester of the Year. Maybe I can propose and let's see the voting on that. The idea is, I think it's the same, we always come back to, which is it's a tool and it's an accelerator. As long as we have the people using it, it's going to free up time for them to do the bits of the job they enjoy and abstract away the bits of the job they don't. I'm hoping we're going to see that in testing too. [Szilárd] (21:10 - 25:10) Honestly, I focus more on quality holistically, so not only testing but what do we need to do to make sure that we build in quality in our processes, we build in quality in our products from the very first step. And AI will help us a lot. For example, if we say that quality is something important for someone important, how will you identify the value based on or from all the noise that you have, all the information that you receive, all the feedback from your customers? What's the next important value piece to deliver for them? AI can analyze that. What are the wishes for the end users, what they tolerate and what do they want more? So, in quality aspects, what are the things you cannot brea,k and what are the things that you need to provide more? So there's a lot of potential, not only in testing, but bringing this overall understanding in the service design step. Then, helping with coding and high-quality coding, first helping with the requirement understanding, helping to define the acceptance criteria's specification by example, then helping on coding, code quality, then helping on generating unit tests or suggesting new unit tests. And then we come into, okay, now let's use AI for the testing purposes, generating acceptance tests, suggesting negative scenarios, making sure you don't forget non-functional aspects like anything related to GDPR. Do I need to remember all the rules of GDPR, or can I give that task to my AI agent, to the data process owner, and then that agent will know, we will script it there to remember the latest regulations and always warn me to have that. With my colleague Jani, we discussed quality whisperers, like having an agent type, which should always be there and tell to humans, tell to other agents what not to forget. So bringing that part in. And then of course, if we go into the operation side of the whole quality assurance, AI could help us there as well to capture anomalies, to warn us on if something is going wrong, collect feedback from the crowd that giving, you know, quantitative feedback on the perceived quality, what do we do next? What is the next step to be taken related to quality? So, I see how beneficial it will be to have AI and AI agents in all the whole software development flow. But I also see the challenge of how to design an AI agentic workflow, the development process and the development workflow to make sure we have good quality outcomes from the development system. And just to add on that, I believe that DevOps will be extremely important and still important as the safety net for any AI-driven development, as well as we need to solve the two big problems of communication problem, like how to tell the agent what we want and what we need to have, how to make sure they are understanding all the context that needs to be understood, but also the Oracle problem, what good looks like, because still, we need to validate the outcome of the agent in some way. It could be the pipeline, the CI/CD pipeline running actual tests and giving feedback on the correctness quickly, but it could also be the human in the loop who is reviewing the outcome of the agents and just saying, OK, this looks good. But then you need to know the same context, you need to know the same things as well to be able to say, is it good enough or not? So I think the problem won't go away, but it will put the whole situation on a different level. [Darren] (25:10 - 25:43) It will be fun. Yeah, and I think we have to remember that AI is not happening in a vacuum to software testing. It's happening everywhere. So, as an accelerator, it's going to be scaling up development to levels where testers are needing AI just to be able to keep up with the volume of code coming in. Absolutely. So I think we're going to see some interesting development, and I'm pretty sure testing is going to be vital given the, let's say, dip in code quality a lot of people are expecting and experiencing with all of this AI-generated code. [Szilárd] (25:44 - 26:28) I very much believe that just if we look at what Copilot says that development is now 55% more efficient, that means testing needs to at least be 55% more efficient as well, right? So there will be a lot, and there are already a lot of dedicated testing agents which could do test case suggestions, then even like testing products just by looking at the whole screen and identifying what to click on, figuring out the journeys. There's a lot of good tools that help you do autonomous testing. We need to build them into the whole workflow, right? And we need to understand what are the risks that these can remove and what are the risks that we still need to deal with some manual processes. [Darren] (26:29 - 26:36) Okay, we need to start wrapping up at this point, but you have some upcoming appearances if you want to tell us about them. [Szilárd] (26:36 - 28:05) Well, that's one of the pillars of the success or, you know, this award as well. Some people said they very much like the content I brought to them on the different conferences and that, you know, it's good feedback, great feedback to make sure that I'm having the energy to go to the next conferences as well. So I think the next one will be the User Conference on Advanced Automated Testing by Etsy, the standardization body in Thessaloniki, 1st of April to 3rd of April. And this is also a conference very close to my heart. I've been on this one again since 2011, something like that, contributing to the conference and being a member of the program committee, being a member of the review board, but also from time to time having the chance to get on stage. And this one, this time I run the Pipeline Game Workshop, as well as giving a talk on the three pillars, balanced quality model that we built last year. And of course, there's a couple of others. So this half-year, I think I have already five or six presentations, a few more coming. And it's really good to have conference talks as well as workshops where at the workshops, I can learn so much from the participants, because I think that's the biggest point to learn from the others, learn from the community, as we stated in the beginning. [Pinja] (28:05 - 28:20) Previously, in our discussion today, you mentioned a couple of names from along the way. So, are there any few people you would like to mention as some people to also look for and look up to in this community? [Szilárd] (28:20 - 30:25) Oh my god, as I'm always saying, I'm also standing on the shoulders of giants, right? So maybe one name I really need to shout out is Emily Betsch. She originally designed the Pipeline Card Game. That is a card deck with which teams can learn the basics of CI/CD. But not only that, but they can collaboratively design CI/CD Pipeline, not by typing the JSON file and trunking Jenkins. I love the power of the gamification that this game gives into the hands of the people. And as that card game is owned by Eficode, by us, we are using that, we are improving that. There is also an online version, but as I said, the original version came from Emily and I'm very happy to use that. And there's another card game I'm using very frequently in my workshops, and that's the TestSphere, the risk-storming card deck from Berenfondale. And those cards are also amazing. Those are helping people to understand risks, quality characteristics, different testing techniques, and again, in a very gamified way. And I like to combine in my workshops, I combine these two card games and building qualitative strategies around your Pipeline using these games. But I'm having a lot of international connections now, people with whom we are planning to get on stage, like, you know, my competitors, to be honest, right, in the testing consultant industry. On the other hand, friends with whom we will go and share our knowledge together. I think this is amazing. And again, a step out to build the community and get help from the community as well. And of course, I'm very happy and thankful for the whole team, the advisory and coaching team here in Eficode, giving all the knowledge and bringing us together and, you know, sharing all those good memories and good learnings and building the future of software development. Right, Pinya? [Pinja] (30:25 - 30:34) You're absolutely right, Szilárd. And I think that's the time we have here today. So Zillert, thank you so much for joining Darren and myself here. [Szilárd] (30:34 - 30:39) Thank you so much for the invitation and the chance to talk about this big win for me. [Darren] (30:39 - 30:49) And congratulations once again, this is a great achievement. And thank you to everyone for joining us again in the DevOps sauna. We'll be back with another episode. But thank you, Pinja, for joining me today. [Pinja] (30:49 - 30:50) Thank you. Thank you, Darren. [Darren] (30:50 - 30:52) And we hope you join us next time. [Pinja] (30:56 - 31:02) We'll now give our guest a chance to introduce himself and tell you a little bit about who we are. [Szilárd] (31:02 - 31:20) So hi, I'm Szilárd Széll, a Hungarian living in Finland for six long winters by now. I'm a Quality Assurance Coach and DevOps Transformation Lead in Eficode, a member of ISTQB and an active member of communities, well, all around the world. [Darren] (31:21 - 31:24) I'm Darren Richardson, Security Consultant at Eficode. [Pinja] (31:25 - 31:29) I'm Pinja Kujala. I specialize in Agile and portfolio management topics at Eficode. [Darren] (31:29 - 31:32) Thanks for tuning in. We'll catch you next time. [Pinja] (31:32 - 31:40)