Testing Java microservices & Accessibility and inclusive design

At our first meetup of 2020, we'll take care of food, drinks and 2 awesome talks. You just need to bring you ;-)

Sebastian Daschner will kick off, talking about effective automated testing of Java microservices.
Next, Jesse Wienholts and Mats Stijlaart will show how a software team significantly improved the accessibility of their frontends at the Dutch Railways (NS).

Both talks will be presented in English. RSVP now for an evening of learning and fun!

The meetup will be at the OpenValue office in Utrecht (https://route.openvalue.nl), enough free parking spaces available.

Agenda

17:30 Walk in
18:00 Food
18:30 Talk 1 (see below)
19:30 Break
19:45 Talk 2 (see below)
20:45 Drinks

First talk: "Write tests that spark flow" by Sebastian Daschner
For most enterprise projects, testing is not really fun. It’s boring, cumbersome, and takes time and effort - especially for distributed applications or when changes in existing functionality forces test scenarios to adapt. Still, software tests are crucial; so, how can we tackle them in an effective and productive way?

This session shows what is necessary to effectively test Java microservices in an automated way. We’ll see which approaches work well, how to keep a fast feedback loop and constant velocity, how to manage complex test scenarios that involve multiple services, and how to verify our API contracts. One of the key aspects will be how to write maintainable test code with high quality that embraces principles of software craftsmanship. I’ll be live-coding test cases using Enterprise Java, Quarkus, Docker, and Kubernetes. Join us to improve your testing flow experience.

About Sebastian
Sebastian Daschner is a Java Developer Advocate at IBM, a consultant, author, and trainer. He is the author of the book ‘Architecting Modern Java EE Applications’. For his contributions in the Java community and ecosystem he was recognized as a Java Champion, Oracle Developer Champion, and JavaOne Rockstar. Besides Java, Sebastian is a heavy user of cloud native technologies and anything related to enterprise software. He evangelizes computer science practices on https://blog.sebastian-daschner.com, his newsletter, and on Twitter via @DaschnerS.

Second talk: "Accessibility and Inclusive Design" by Mats Stijlaart and Jesse Wienholts.

In this session we show how an accessibility domain expert helped a software team to significantly improve the accessibility of their frontends at the Dutch Railways (NS).

Jesse joined the Dutch railways as an intern, and what is special about Jesse is that he uses his computer different than the majority of the users. He navigates through his browser via a screen reader. This has some advantages, such as speed of using websites (we will; see this during the session), but does also limit him in his daily tasks while many websites are not optimised for screenreader software. To prevent this, websites need to be accessible.

In many frontend projects accessibility is an aspect that is ignored until it is required. This may lead to a lot of eyesore when it is actually added and may bring in additional costs.

In this session we go through a few of the accessibility mistakes we have made at the Dutch Railways, how Jesse helped the team, and which takeaways helped the team and may help you in the future.

About Jesse
I am a 3rd year student in the field of Business & IT management at The Hague university of applied sciences. I also work at envision ai, an app where we use the possibilities of artificial intelligence to help blind and visually impaired people. In my free time you can find me on the water in a dragonboat.

About Mats
I am a software engineer at OpenValue and I am currently stationed at the Dutch Railways (NS) as a full stack engineer. I like to eat regexes for breakfast, and drink beers at night. In my spare time I like to fiddle around with new programming languages, puzzles and new tech.