How to Love Uncertainty: A Confession About Testing Intercoms

How do you test an IoT integration from scratch when there are no test cases, you have to assemble and configure the hardware yourself, and some of the bugs literally turn into a hellish noise?

In this talk, I’ll share my experience testing an intercom integration with a smart home app, including answering intercom calls through an Alice-enabled smart speaker. I’ll take you behind the scenes: from visiting real-world locations and building our own test setup to configuring hardware, investigating unexpected audio echo, and designing E2E scenarios from scratch. I’ll also talk about what my role as a QA engineer looked like when testing went far beyond simply following predefined test cases.

This is a story about navigating uncertainty: turning chaos into a clear testing strategy one step at a time, stepping outside the usual QA routine, and learning to enjoy the kind of tasks where, at first, you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.