The Joys of QA Management - Jake Brower

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Jake Brower

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Talk Description

You’re crazy, right?

You spend your days herding cats. You play the good cop. You play the bad cop. You’re a facilitator, a mentor and a firefighter. If all of these apply to you then you’re probably a QA Manager. And you might be thinking, there must be a better way?

What if your staff were continually enhancing their skills through constant learning? What if everyone had consistent mentoring? Are you building a team of testers who can dynamically jump in? With all of these in place, I’m sure you’d agree that your life would be easier.

Throughout my 23-year career in varying Quality roles, I’ve led transformations of Quality teams. QA is no longer a team of “weirdos” just waiting for work to be thrown over the wall. I’ve witnessed the struggles, the compromises, the pains. Where successful companies have needed more from Quality teams, I have helped to instill and embed quality throughout. Through active nurturing and my own passion for quality, I’ve helped people realise their own potential, and become advocates for quality across organisations.

In this talk, I will share my experiences on building highly successful QA teams. We will talk about finding great testers with strong communication abilities, hands-on technical skills, the flexibility to adapt to change, and who embrace cultural diversity. I will explain a few tips on interview techniques that work well vs those that always backfire. I will provide some knowledge on how to balance team dynamics with individual performance. We will also discuss detailed insights on why we love our jobs and what keeps us all going year after year.

Takeaways

  • Understanding the pitfalls and rewards for managing Quality resources
  • Hiring the right people for Quality teams: what works and what doesn’t
  • Why many Quality managers love what they do, year after year
  • Pushing Quality teams to inform, install, and inject quality wherever possible

 

What you’ll learn

By the end of this talk, you'll be able to:

  • TBA
Jake Brower's profile'

Jake Brower

Jake Brower is a Quality Engineering Manager, Scrum Master, and Agile Facilitator with Credit Karma in San Francisco and has worked in software testing since 1994 where he started his career building/testing web sites for local nonprofits in Seattle. From there, he worked at various companies testing everything from AS400 mainframe systems to commercial web sites to desktop and mobile apps. He has been in San Francisco now for 15 years and in that time he's led many Quality/company-wide transformations that focus on pushing Quality further left, driving process engineering/adoption, and guiding testing teams to hone their intuition skills beyond the scripted test.

Jake's true passions lie in managing people and building world-class teams. Having been in management for about 10 years, he has acquired deep skills in hiring/managing/mentoring and has a great love of learning what makes people tick as well as their motivations for doing what they do every day. Jake's other passion is electronic music production and he has toured the world making live techno on stages big and small.

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Topics

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  • leadership