Skills to pay the bills! Creating testers for the future with Gwen Diagram

Description:

Congratulations, you’ve worked with developers, testers and leadership to create a test strategy but now, you’ve got a problem. Your test team doesn’t currently have the skills to carry it out! What’s a person in your position to do?

You need more than strategies to build a successful product. To provide your teams with the tools for success, you need to identify where testers can have the biggest impact. By the end of the talk, you will see three pillars; test strategy, skills based coaching and targeting training. Together, these will build testers with a holistic view of quality. She will show examples of how to develop testers that are effective for mobile, micro-services or web applications. You will see coaching tools to help you identify where your tester’s skills are at the moment and where they would like to grow. Using knowledge gained from analysis on skills and strategy, she will demonstrate how to create training plans for the test team. Together, these strategies will assist in building a strong quality culture with skilled testers.

By teaching your test team new skills, you will be empowering them for the future. A tester with more tools in their kit will have better confidence and job prospects. Knowledge is power!

Bio: Gwen Diagram is a technology professional from Leeds who specialises in testing. She is an avid automation evangelist with a focus on testing complemented by repeatable build processes with monitoring. She has had varied roles throughout her career including Scrum Master at a Start Up, Engineering Manager at a bank and DevOps kid at a large Financial Services organisation.

As a strong believer in making the tech industry as open and punk as possible, she co-organises a twice yearly free day long testing conference called the Leeds Testing Atelier. She speaks regularly at local meet-up groups, Agile Yorkshire and Leeds DevOps, duels with creative types at events like the Tech Off, speaks internationally at conferences such as Nordic Testing Days in Tallinn and was the closing keynote at Agile on the Beach in Falmouth, UK in 2018.

Outside of work, you will usually find her hanging around a Natural History Museum somewhere in the world marvelling at how incredibly excellent dinosaurs are, feeding pigeons or ducks or obsessing over transport.