Report from Agile Testing expo
We attended the Agile Testing Expo in Danvers (Boston area, Ma) about one week ago. It was the first edition of this event in the US after several successful editions in Germany. We handpicked this event as a part of our Expo tour in the US. A convenient area for us to travel as several of our customers and prospects are located in the Boston area. In this IT business where a lot can be done remotely, we always enjoy meeting face to face with our supporters to share some good talks.
Booth¶
The expo was organised in the expo hall of the Hilton DoubleTree hotel. Count a 30 minutes drive North of Boston to reach the place. On the event, every exhibitor had a small corner to display its materials, no large booths, only a table and room for a couple of banners. We made the call to display our colors and openly communicate on JMeter and our basic strengths (Easy scripting, Intuitive design, Live results). A good call as we were the only company to communicate about JMeter among our competitors. A good keyword when it comes to performance testing. This is something we experienced at StarWest in October also, it drags people's interest.
Guillaume Betaillouloux (Performance director) and I (Quentin Hamard, COO) were on the booth. OctoPerf was a Silver sponsor of the event, not that we are really attached to the sponsorship idea, but it was included in the exhibitor package.
You know our mindset, we prefer to invest in the product that in marketing. So we travelled light. In addition to our banners and flyers, we had printed our funny stickers for the occasion. They made a lot of people smile. But it was the second time we distribute this gift, we will have to find something else next time.
Audience and game prize¶
The organisation expected to host about 300 guests for the event. I'm Forced to say that we were quite far from this number. I'd bet on 150 people out of speakers and exhibitors. Fortunately, we made good contacts anyway and enjoyed seeing some prospects who drove hours to see us.
There was a "passport game" organised by TechWell (one of the organising party) to drag people on the booth. The staff organises a big raffle with prizes from each exhibitor. If you want to have a chance to win you have to stamp your "passport" on every booth. It is a good way to invite people to visit each exhibitor's booth. The game wasn't that successful though since there were barely enough participants for all the prizes. Perhaps a miscommunication from to the organisation. That being said it is always a good moment in a good atmosphere. We decided to offer a funny prize: a Tie-fighter lego Star Wars.
Congratulation to our winner!
What we saw¶
There was of course, a lot of talk around automation and in particular CI/CD. It is definitely an important step for modern organizations. As you may already know we already provide a lot in this area and will continue to do so. Thanks to our Jenkins plugin and our rest API
Devops is also a big trend and you could tell that a lot of people are actively moving there. Most of the vendors on this event were here to help with this process. OctoPerf is no exception.
We were a bit sad to notice that aside from us, nobody really put JMeter forward. We strongly believe it is still a great tool to answer these challenges, in particular when combined with OctoPerf!
Conclusion¶
Despite the low traffic in the expo hall, it was a good thing to be in Boston and attend the expo. A great occasion for us coming from France to meet in person with our contacts and introduce our company in this region. Let's give a chance to the Agile testing days in the US, I am sure they will definitely improve the event in the next edition. Our next stop is StarWest in Anaheim (Los Angeles Area) in October. It's going to be a big event this time. See you there and after for our feedback.
