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It's time to SyncIpswich

What: SyncIpswich March; Building and Testing software at Google Scale

When: Thursday 21st March @ 6pm

Where: A central Ipswich location

Sign-up: http://www.syncipswich.com/events/101237482/

I was born about a mile from where I now live. The hospital is flats now and my children were born at the new hospital outside the city. I live about fifty yards from the house where I grew up in a city I spent my entire teenage years trying to get away from. I did get away, until I was in my late twenties. Now that I’m back I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else and I’m proud to be from Norwich. Part of being proud to be from Norwich is the friendly rivalry between us and Ipswich (even if, like me, you’re not a football supporter). So I am absolutely delighted to be able to SyncIpswich for the first time in March.

The phenomenal success of SyncNorwich has taken everyone, including me, by surprise. It’s only natural that we would want to take this winning formula to other places (I can’t say cities, because obviously Ipswich is only a town! I’m not saying cities are better or anything, honest!). The first of our SyncCities outside of Norwich is SyncIpswich.  It’s being run by fellow Smart421 associate and the owner of Chrysalis Technology, Carl Farmer, a very capable pair of hands that I met at Agile Cambridge some years ago.

The first SyncIpswich is on Thursday 21st of March between 6pm and 8pm at a still to be determined venue in central Ipswich. It’s going to be covering software quality on an epic scale. It will begin with a summary of SyncNorwich & SyncCity from me as well as an introduction to SyncIpswich and their sponsors.

Next up is a two part talk by Daniel Wagner-Hall of Google. He will cover testing principles & approaches, common hurdles and how Google go about testing. Some of you will remember Dan’s talk at SyncNorwich in October. Unfortunately we lost the video, so now is an ideal opportunity to see it again if you missed it.  There will be drinks and nibbles courtesy of SyncIpswich’s sponsors.

Daniel Wagner-Hall is a Software Engineer in Test at Google, working with teams across the whole company to supply infrastructure and libraries to enable effective, efficient development and automated testing at massive scale. He is a committer to the Selenium project, but wishes people would use it less than they do.

Google has over 100 million lines of code, all building in a single codebase, on a single branch. They make 60 changes per minute, and run more automated test cases per day than the populations of many countries. Daniel will talk about the development models they use, and their approaches to scalable testing, covering problems at a team level (which apply broadly), as well as those which only crop up when you add a few zeros to the end of every metric!

A return to Ipswich from Norwich is only £16.50. Some of you may know that we’ve had a regular delegation from Ipswich to SyncNorwich since it was Agile East Anglia and more recently to the East Anglia MongoDB User Group too. So let’s return the favour and visit Ipswich in force.

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