Nordic Testing Days 2025 Summary

Just spent a couple of days in one of my favorite conferences, Nordic Testing Days. Not sure how many times I’ve been there, but I’m happy to return again every time.

The 3-day conference started off with my “Introduction to Testing with Playwright” full-day tutorial. We started from scratch, went through installation, configuration and of course, automating and testing. The tutorial was bi-lingual – Both Typescript and Python, with a smidge of Java.

That was a full day of people solving hands-on exercises. And a bit of technical support. But everything turned out well.

Following the tutorial, we went for a walk of the old city of Tallinn, and the organizers chose the perfect weather.

Nordic Testing Days – Day 2

The second day, I was off work, so went to a couple of talks. I enjoyed Lars Sjödahl talk on “it sounds the same, but it means something different to me”. Lars presented multiple things we assume are accurate, but others, and other software, may find different.

There were a couple talks and workshops on Playwright (including yours truly’s), and I managed to catch Ashish Ghosh with real-world suggestions. Cool talk.

Irja Straus‘ talk about working and testing robots, actual forklifts, was excellent, presenting the challenges of the actual work in a factory. Victoria Kiskina talked about a topic near and dear to my heart – accessibility. Alex Cusmaru talked about managing train testing (real trains). All cool excellent talks.

The final keynote of the day was Liisa Past, and it was about communication. How to deliver your message, think about the recipient. And not underestimate them. A lovely talk and a wonderful human being.

After the party, we had some lovely lightning talks (In mine, I mentioned a couple of things AI can help us with testing). And then there was the PowerPoint Karaoke. Less chickens this year, but they were not completely missing. If you know, you know.

Then… Day 3

Third and final day I was up again for some workshoping. I squeezed my whole day of “Automation with Postman for manual testers” workshop into a couple of hours, and unveiled some automation magic.

We started off with variables in Postman, then moved on to chaining requests and moved on to pre-requests and post-requests. That’s me going variable.

I then went to a couple of more talks, specifically I liked Markus Tucker‘s on API type validation, and Risko Ruus on web performance metrics. The final keynote, was a set of stories from the inventor of Oculus and hardware master for the XBox 360, who also worked on the sound engineering of Terminator 2. Jack J. McCauley. Be Jealous.

It’s interesting how NTD gets all kinds of talks and workshops, all encompassing different types of testing. And NTD keynotes are something else. They bring people from different ways of life, not necessarily testing, but their stories have a direct connection.

It wouldn’t be a great conference without the social aspects. Met friends again, and made some new ones. Finally, great job and thank you to the organizers, who have been running this for 14 years now.

Hoping to get there for the 15th birthday!