Small Team, Big Stack: A Quality Toolkit Built from the Ground Up
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Small Team, Big Stack: A Quality Toolkit Built from the Ground Up
Most talks about quality assume you've got a QA team, a test framework someone already built, and headcount to spare.
This one's for when you don't.
Sam Connelly, Principal Quality Consultant within the Equal Experts network in Australia, walks through how a small startup team builds and maintains confidence in what they ship — for a predominantly JavaScript web app — without any of that safety net.
What we'll cover:
- Unit testing — what we actually test (and, just as importantly, what we don't)
- BDD, pragmatically — the test framework we built, and how we've kept it extensible as our underlying model evolves
- Debugging from the outside in — using analytics frameworks to reconstruct what a user did right before something broke
- Where we're headed — early experiments including a self-healing UI E2E agent, and using Claude Code as an exploratory testing partner rather than just a coding tool
This isn't a best-practices talk. It's what quality actually looks like when you're small, resource-constrained, and building the plane while flying it. You'll leave with practical ideas for your own toolkit — whatever size team you're working with.
Agenda
5 30 PM - Gates open (Networking drinks & food)
6 15 PM - G-EE-K Talk
7 PM - Q&A
7 15 PM - Networking drinks (and more food)
8 PM - Wrap up