After 2020, the PTA’s internal summer seminar had to be held virtually again this year due to the pandemic situation. However, this did not detract from the lively response and attendance at the biannual event with specialist presentations and the management report. On 18 June, numerous participants brought themselves up to date in terms of digitalization, programming and IT and process consulting and presented current trends and solutions. And there is a good chance that the seminar will be able to return to its usual attendance mode in winter. If the infection situation allows, PTA GmbH, based in Mannheim, is planning for all employees to meet at the Maritim Hotel in Stuttgart for this year’s winter seminar.
“For the second year in a row, we had to hold our internal series of events for the summer seminar virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic. We have all embraced and made use of agile, mobile and digital collaboration tools and for many of us, the new form of collaboration is now a matter of course,” says the management of management consultancy PTA GmbH, explaining the new virtual edition of the seminar. “We’re still really looking forward to meeting up in person again in winter, if the restrictions allow.”
Although virtually, the PTA experts also used this training session to take an in-depth look at the latest digitalization trends and developments in IT and process consulting and to engage in a lively exchange of ideas. As usual, after a short welcome round via Microsoft Teams, the participants started into parallel online sessions. Once again this year, the topics on offer were varied and wide-ranging.
State of the art from the ARENA
This was the title of the project presented by the team led by Dimitrios Chalepakis, Simon Reis and Frank Dietrich in their session on the billing software of a transmission system operator. The experts explained modern approaches using microapps in a monorepository based on the TypeScript-based front-end web application framework angular and showed how JAVA can be used to implement a microservice architecture in the backend. However, the team was far from at the end of its tether. The PTA programmers explained to the participants how they can manage automated database migration in a JAVA environment with Flyway or achieve a secure single sign-on with Keycloak. The approaches are promising and the team is implementing a very innovative and trend-setting architecture with ARENA.
In the second web session, the team led by Gerhard Ahrens, Gunter Dubrau and Matthias Hoffmann explored the question of whether prototypes in software development should simply be thrown away or left to evolve. The various methodological and technological approaches reflected the broad spectrum of tasks covered by the PTA.
In the third topic slot, Ekaterina Borovinskaya discussed valuable trends, tips and tricks that have proven their worth in test automation. In her presentation, the speaker raised awareness of the fact that the increasing complexity of software systems and thus the increasing need for testing are often under enormous time and cost pressure, which means that many project managers often can no longer avoid automated software tests. In order to achieve high software quality, it is essential to keep as many of the planned test cases for regression tests as possible up to date in order to achieve high test coverage on the one hand and to quickly detect side effects of program or object changes on the other. The IT consultant used the example of a current PTA project to show which methods have proven successful in practice.
Virtual café lounge and Tuscan delights
As always, the organizers attached great importance to the social component, which is why the virtual supporting program of the PTA Summer Seminar was also accompanied by coffee and lounge sessions in 2021. As the final get-together, which the participants usually celebrate with a meal together, was unfortunately also canceled this year, the management had a special treat in store: a gift basket full of Tuscan delicacies for all colleagues. Everyone agreed: face-to-face events may be canceled, but culinary delights never are.
Management’s outlook led the seminar
At the end of the virtual seminar series, the PTA Management Board led by Matthias Wossidlo, Dr. Tim Walleyo, Dennis Haßlöcher, Tim Köhler, Kerstin Frey and Robert Fischer gave a detailed overview of the current status of the entire PTA Group, as always. Particular attention was paid to the topic of sustainability and the announcement that the entire PTA Group aims to beCO2-neutral by 2025. The Group recently donated trees to the Bergwaldprojekt e.V. and is reforesting a 4000 square meter area of native forest.
