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This Edition's Theme

Agents & Empathy: Build Smarter Tools, Test Like Humans

What happens when you give your AI agent access to any tool it needs — and when you turn user empathy into a quality engine that never stops? At this meetup we explore two sides of the same coin: how to extend AI agent capabilities through Model Context Protocol (MCP), and how to combine authentic manual testing — where you truly feel the user's experience — with smart automation that turns discoveries into action. Whether you want to build your own MCP server or bring a culture of quality to your team, you'll leave with concrete ideas and tools you can apply starting Monday. Presentations: 🔧 Extend Your Agent's Toolbox — What Are MCPs and How to Build Your Own 🧪 Test Like a User. Automate the Rest.

📅 23 aprilie 202618:15📍 Adobe Systems Romania

Calea Șerban Vodă 206-218, 040215 București, U center 2, floor 7

Who's presenting?

Speakers

Andra Marin
talk

Andra Marin

Software Quality Engineer at Adobe

Andra is a Software Quality Engineer with nearly 18 years in the testing world, spanning manual testing, automation, and performance. She currently works as part of a feature team, helping deliver features that meet the company's quality standards and empower users to embrace their creativity. Over the years, she's worn many hats — from writing Selenium scripts and JMeter tests to leading QA efforts and shaping acceptance criteria alongside development teams. A curious person by nature, Andra's interests stretch well beyond quality: arts, photography, and sci-fi books all compete for her attention. She's an introvert who lets her work do the talking and values clarity over filler.

Ana Dobrescu
talk

Ana Dobrescu

Software Quality Engineer at Adobe

Ana is a Senior Quality Engineer at Adobe, where she’s spent the last two and a half years. Her earlier work was in banking—testing products and integration flows—so moving to Adobe Express meant a shift to an in-house product and a different rhythm from outsourced testing teams. After two years on Express, she’s clearer than ever that strong products come from people working closely together, not from process alone. Away from work, she likes exploring new places with her family and is keen on making new experiences.

Letitia Antohe
talk

Letitia Antohe

Senior Quality Engineer at Adobe

Letitia Antohe is a Senior Quality Engineer at Adobe with over 20 years of experience building and testing software at scale. Based in Romania, she works on Adobe Express and has a deep focus on end-to-end test strategy, exploratory testing, and quality engineering tooling. With a background in computer science and networking, a taste of Product Management, she appreciates the human touch and the empathy that make a team and a product spark.   Letitia is passionate about user experience,  making quality engineering smarter and  bringing structure to ambiguous, fast-moving release cycles.  When she's not testing, she's thinking about how AI can help teams ship with more confidence, try out a new board game, gardening and most importantly spending quality time with the family.

Andrei Mihai
talk

Andrei Mihai

ML Services Engineer at Adobe

Andrei Mihai is an ML Services Engineer at Adobe, where he drives DevOps and MLOps initiatives. With almost 20 years of experience in Software Development, he has worked extensively with Java, Python, Kubernetes, Linux, and GitOps. He enjoys continuously expanding his knowledge, understanding the bigger picture, and exploring how technologies interconnect to build efficient and scalable solutions. His passion for technology goes beyond professional work; he is always eager to experiment with new tools, explore emerging tech (like Quantum Computing), and to discuss innovative ideas and real-world applications.

Schedule

The Testing Plan

🕐 18:15-18:30

Welcome & Gather

🕐 18:30-19:15

Extend your agent’s toolbox. What are MCPs and how to build your own.

Andra Marin
Andra Marin
Andrei Mihai
Andrei Mihai

AI assistants are only as powerful as the set of tools they have access to. Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open protocol for connecting your agent to external systems, databases, APIs, internal tools, or custom scripts — without being locked into a single ecosystem or client (e.g., Cursor, Claude, Codex). In this presentation we clarify what MCP is, in which scenarios it brings value, the risks that can arise, and when an MCP is not necessarily the best solution. We then walk through the essential steps to design and deliver your own MCP server, so your team can extend the agent's toolbox in a controlled way. Whether you're a tester, developer, or manager, you'll leave with a clear understanding of the MCP ecosystem and, perhaps, your first ideas for your own tool.

🕐 19:15-20:00

Test Like a User. Automate the Rest

Letitia Antohe
Letitia Antohe
Ana Dobrescu
Ana Dobrescu

How a weekly ritual of sitting down and actually using your product — combined with AI-powered issue logging — became a quality engine that never sleeps. They say you can't feel a user's pain from a dashboard. You have to sit down, open the product, and try to make something — and when something breaks, that's not just a bug. That's a story worth telling, and a quality worth fighting for. Great software isn't built by one — it's built by teams that all care about the experience. When Engineers, PMs, and Designers use the product alongside QEs, they don't just find bugs; they develop empathy for users. Team Testing events make shared ownership real and feeling a user's frustration is irreplaceable. But turning that feeling into a well-formed Jira ticket? That's where automation steps in, so testers spend time discovering problems, not transcribing them. It's been 3 years. 1,200+ insights. 1 dedicated team.

🕐 20:15-21:00

Networking & follow-up discussions

We continue the stories about testing in quality company.

Thanks to this month's host

Adobe Systems Romania

📁 Materials & Resources

Slides, photos, and other resources from the event

📷Photo Gallery

📅

Event Ended

This event has already taken place. Stay connected for future editions!

From the archive

See what we discussed in previous editions.

📍 BucurestiRegistration closed

Community & Cognition: Keeping the QA mind sharp

As testing evolves with AI, our greatest assets remain deeply human: how we connect to learn and how we critically analyze systems. This edition of Tabăra de Testare focuses on two essential pillars of our profession: the power of community and preserving critical thinking. First, Mikko Paloheimo, QA Coach and co-organizer of the Finnish Testing Meetup Group, takes us behind the scenes of running a massive testing community. By bridging the Finnish and Romanian testing scenes, we’ll explore how communities keep testers learning and what we can adopt from each other. Then, Stefan Bratosin, Senior QA Engineer, challenges the current AI hype. While automation accelerates work, over-relying on predictive text systems can quietly erode a tester's most valuable tool: critical thinking. Stefan will dive into the "Black Box Effect" and introduce a practical framework to ensure AI remains just a tool, not a substitute for our analytical minds.

📍 BucurestiRegistration closed

Panel: Testing in the Age of AI

Software development has changed faster in the last two years than in the previous ten — code is generated in seconds, features ship with built-in chatbots, and AI copilots have quietly become part of almost every team's workflow. QA hasn't stood still either, and on this panel we'll dig into how the craft is shifting in practice: writing tests with AI, generating test data on demand, and rethinking what a test suite even looks like when half the tooling can think back. But the harder questions remain — how do you test systems that don't behave the same way twice, written partly by machines that don't explain themselves? And underneath it all, the one nobody loves saying out loud: if AI is writing the code and helping test it, where does that leave us in two years? Three panelists, one moderator, and a room of QA people figuring out what testing actually looks like now — bring your questions and disagreements, because half of this conversation belongs to the audience.

📍 BucurestiRegistration closed

Shift-Left Strategy & Testing Misconceptions

For this edition of Tabara de Testare, we are putting textbook theory aside to discuss the realities on the ground. We are addressing two essential topics that every QA team faces daily: the misconceptions that slow down our work and the eternal "Shift-Left" promise - something many companies preach, but few actually apply properly. We will discover how to dismantle the most common misconceptions about software testing and explore practical strategies to bring testing much earlier into the development process, with a focus on static testing. We believe that no one holds the absolute truth, so we look forward to having you join us for an evening of open technical discussions, experience sharing, and, of course, the traditional networking!

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