TestBash Leadership

What

Talk

Topics

#testability

Lessons Learned As A Quality Engineering Manager

Description

This talk is about when I was a test lead in a development team that moved to testability, succeeded but then ultimately failed to maintain the new way of working. I’ll detail how we got started with testability, what caused us to fail in maintaining the approach and how other teams could do it differently.

How we got started will cover: how we created a joint understand in what testability means for our product. How our team leaders encouraged experimentation, reflection and speaking up which was key for collaboration. This level of collaboration coupled with their joint understanding is what really enabled the team to build in testability.

Why we failed will cover: what foundational team behaviours were missed by the leaders for this approach to continue beyond the initial implementation. The foundations being establishing psychological safety, how everyone can and must learn from failure, how to work across discipline boundaries and the power of positively framing work.

What others can do will cover: Why team leaders are best positioned to do this. I’ll detail some basic steps that teams can take towards: creating psychological safety, how teams can get better at learning from failure, what they can do to encourage working across discipline boundaries and what positively framing work looks like

Takeaways

What we are doing wrong in teams that causes testability to fail testability isn’t the problem but team culture via incentives are
What are the leadership behaviours that enable success with testability encouraged experimentation, reflection and speaking up which was key for collaboration
What steps can be taken to maintaining testability once established creating psychological safety, how teams can better learn from failure, what they can do to encourage working across discipline boundaries and what positively framing work looks like

Speaker

Jitesh Gosai

Principal Tester

Jitesh Gosai has over 19 years of testing experience, working with various companies enabling them to build, test and automate at scale. He is currently a principal tester at the BBC in the iPlayer & Sounds department, working with Mobile, TV, Web and Smart speaker teams. His core aim is to create a Culture of Quality by helping teams build quality into their products. In his free time, he likes to speak about his experiences at conferences all over Europe and blogs regularly at https://www.jitgo.uk/blog and tweets @jitgo

Marie Cruz

What

Talk

Topics

#quality

Testing Ask Me Anything - Leadership with Toby Sinclair

Description

It has been a year since I made the transition from an individual contributor to a people manager and in this talk, I want to share key lessons that I learned as a new Quality Engineering Manager.

The session aims to provide guidance to individuals thinking of becoming a people manager.

I'll be talking about what has worked well with my direct reports, what hasn't worked well and an overall reflection of how I made relationships with my direct reports all while working remotely.

Takeaways

Learned what skills you would need as a People Manager
Understand why leading with empathy and kindness is important
How to deal with difficult conversations
Learned what further resources such as books and podcasts can help you with your management journey

Speaker

Marie Cruz

Developer Advocate

Marie Cruz is currently a Developer Advocate at k6.io and Grafana Labs. She is a tech blogger at testingwithmarie.com and an accessibility advocate. She is also an online course instructor at Ministry of Testing and Test Automation University.

Toby Sinclair

Ama

What

Ama

Topics

#coaching

Description

Toby, a certified professional coach, started his career as a Software Developer. After a few years, he became more curious about the ingredients of a high-performance culture. This lead to a journey of self-discovery. Exploring how to unlock performance in himself so that he could help others.

In this session, hosted by the great Vernon Richards, Toby will be answering questions about Leadership, from our attendees live on the Main Stage.

To learn more about Toby's story and career, check out his website here.

Speaker

Toby Sinclair

Coach, Teacher, Advisor

I help tech leaders gain clarity and confidence in how to coach their teams.

Book Clubs Are The Best

Joep Schuurkes

What

Book Suggestion

Topics

#continuous-learning

Managing People with Autism

Description

At my previous job I felt we could support people more in developing their leadership skills. So I started a leadership book club, where we discuss two chapters of a book every other week. And very deliberately I made the first book we read Jerry Weinberg's "Becoming a Technical Leader." Because it's a great book, but more importantly because I wanted to start the book club off with his definition of leadership: creating an environment where everyone can contribute. So leadership is for anyone, not just for a "leadership team".

In this talk I'll tell the story of how I started and ran the book club. Of what changed once we were a few books in. And of what value the book club brought.

Takeaways

How to start and run a book club
Book clubs are a good way to connect with more people at work
Book clubs can be a place where you practice leadership

Speaker

Joep Schuurkes

quality engineer

Joep wandered into software testing in 2006. After a decade in which he learned (and practiced) exploratory testing and test automation, his focus shifted to a bigger question. How can teams and organizations build and deliver good software? To answer that question, he has been exploring topics such as technical leadership, agile coaching, and software methodologies. Currently Joep is working as a consultant for Quality Accelerators. He has given talks and workshops at conferences throughout Europe. He's also one of the organizers of the Friends of Good Software unconference.

Eva Podbrdská

What

Talk

Topics

#diversity

What's Hiding in Our Minds? Eye-opening Book by Nobel-prize Winner

Description

You might be managing people who are on the autism spectrum. You might be a manager who is on the spectrum. You might be on the spectrum and managed by somebody. Or you just want to learn a bit about autism. In any case, this talk is for you.

The incidence of ASD in the software industry is many times higher than in the general population. But so often we're not aware that the people we are dealing with on a daily basis are different. It's very hard to spot autism - even in ourselves! Our work environment and the way we communicate with each other are in most cases suited for neurotypical people but autistic people might struggle with it. In most cases it's just a few very simple changes that will allow autistic brains to thrive. And it's not just about being nice - teams that include different types of people with different ways of thinking are stronger and better performing.

As a late diagnosed autistic person, I will try to dispel common myths and misperceptions around the signs and symptoms of the autism spectrum disorder, share my own personal experience and provide tips and guidelines for creating a neurodiversity-friendly environment, be it for your team or for yourself.

Takeaways

What is autism - diagnostic criteria and symptoms
The experience of an autistic person - what life feels like, what are common strengths and difficulties
How to create an autism-friendly work environment and tackle common communication challenges
How to advocate for yourself

Speaker

Eva Podbrdská

QA (Question Asker)

I work as a tester on the backend team of Showmax - a VoD platform operating in sub-saharan Africa. I switched my career into IT in 2019 after my parental leave and it was the best decision in my life so far. I love figuring out how things work, I love playing with APIs, microservices and databases and most of all I love asking questions. I love dogs and sometimes torture my violin. I am autistic (and probably also ADHD)

Marta Woźniak-Semeniuk

What

Book Suggestion

Topics

Can You Do 'Better Than Richard'?

Description

I'd like to talk about how "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman inspired me. This book made me gain more perspective on how the human mind works - which helped me in my work and inspired a few workshops and talks I did.

Speaker

Marta Woźniak-Semeniuk

Agile Coach

Agile Coach and BA, with QA background. Speaker at ATD2019 and TU2019, meetups in Wrocław and Rzeszów, mentor and UWr. Regularly working with people to help them grow and develop themselves in daily work and on workshops. Cat-loving bookworm with never-ending curiosity.

Ajay Balamurugadas, Rahul Parwal

Role Play Scenarios

What

Role Play Scenarios

Topics

Decision Making for Teams

Description

In this session, Rahul Parwal and Ajay Balamurugadas will 'Do Better Than Richard' in this fun, but serious take on bad leadership situations.

For the past weeks, Richard Bradshaw has shared some videos on Twitter, using the #DoBetterThanRichard.

Join this session to see how these situations could have had a better leadership outcome and why not, try your own outcome?

Takeaways

Learn how to be a better leader
Discuss good and bad leadership scenarios

Speakers

Ajay Balamurugadas

Senior Director - QE, GSPANN Technologies

Ajay Balamurugadas, goes by the handle ‘ajay184f’ in the testing community and is continuously re-inventing his testing methodology. He co-founded Weekend Testing - a worldwide movement for skilled testing, authored multiple books available at bit.ly/booksaj and bit.ly/ajleanpub. His friends associate the terms - ‘Change Agent, Idea Man, Motivational’ to him. He tweets under @ajay184f and loves to have long conversations on software testing and life in general. He is currently working at GSPANN Technologies, Inc. as Senior Director - QE. When not testing, he spends time with his wife and two children.

Rahul Parwal

Senior Software Engineer

Rahul is a Software Engineer by education and works as a Senior Software Engineer with ifm engineering pvt. ltd., India. He is a Software Tester by trade, Programmer by practice, and a Mythology lover by heart. His latest e-book is available at https://leanpub.com/productivitytoolkit

Christian Kram

What

Talk

Topics

#test-strategies

Description

In recent years we have put the focus on teams. Things like the whole team approach to testing have become a well known commodity and self-organizing team in scrum are something seen in many companies. One of the major parts of leadership is decision making. But have we adapted our decision making strategies going from a classic one person decides to the team decides?
My company has taken the team approach even further and we don't have any kind of bosses or leadership positions anymore.
In this talk, I will present situations where groups need to decide and what strategies and methods there are to make different kinds of decisions as a group. I will also talk about where at my company our ideas went wrong and where we had to adapt to come to decisions involving everyone without slowing down the decision process.

Takeaways

Decision making for teams
Types of decisions: consensus vs. consent, veto incorporation
Methods for decision making: voting, fist to five, systemic consensing
Typical pitfalls to avoid: how not to slow down and getting into stalls

Speaker

Christian Kram

Trainer and Coach

My core areas as a coach and consultant are quality assurance and software testing. I helped getting customers the quality they need for over 15 years in different roles, ranging from manual tester in comparative product evaluation over automotive test manager to head of testing for ERP software. My main topics are in the field of agile testing, exploratory testing and establishing quality in the whole software development cycle.In addition to software I have been testing real world objects like chairs and mattresses in the past.

Next Level Leadership

Dave Harrison

What

Talk

Topics

#performance

The Paradox of Leadership

Description

This talk will take the 25 years of prior experiences with being promoted into different leadership levels and roles and communicate the lessons learned, things to watch out for, and how leadership 'scope' can expand or contract given the leadership opportunity that one find themselves.

This talk will be structured for multiple takeaway ideas, targeted at people who are in different stages of their careers: (recent college grads/new testers, management-track-not-yet-promoted, first-time-managers-leaders, ready-to-advance-managers-leaders, established managers-leaders)

Takeaways

Considerations for first-time leaders and managers and what are the most important priorities to take on starting out
Once you are promoted within the leadership/management path, how can responsibilities vary, especially if you find yourself in a leadership role and not a management role
The differences between leadership and management that I've learned over the years, and the various outcomes from what I've learned
Career path considerations for testers regarding leadership, management, organisational structure and other aspects

Speaker

Dave Harrison

Sr Director, Quality

Dave Harrison has been working in software testing since the early 1990's. Early projects in his career involved working on the first macintosh laptops along with products that facilitated 'telecommuting' and early versions of web browsers from Netscape and Microsoft. He then grew his career by pursuing opportunities with e-Commerce at Disney, Fortune 500 companies, some government contracting and six successful startups. For the past seven years, he has led testing and quality related programs for one of the largest Fintechs in the world. Dave has attended Test Bash conferences since 2016, giving 99 second talks and helping with onsite discussion groups. TestBash leadership will be his first opportunity to present to a global audience.

Niranjani Manoharan

Discussion: Becoming a Better Leader

What

Talk

Topics

Description

We, very often, consciously or unconsciously live life linearly, solving problems through logical processes while prodding our intellect to understand life through reducing it to its parts and then trying to put them together in different patterns to try and make sense of it all. But life is a paradox.

Similarly, when you’re leading a team, everything is not black and white. Certain aspects are part of the grey area and you’ll have to read between lines to comprehend them. It is not always straightforward to incorporate a quality strategy as there are multitude of factors that can influence them like size of the QA team, ratio of QA:developers, organizational culture, and communication: between your peers, between you and your leadership team, between you and your direct reports. Sometimes in order to move forward, you need to take a few steps back. This isn’t necessarily slowing down but will help you move faster eventually.

Takeaways

Focus on simplicity
Don’t let operational issues hinder your strategic work
Importance of communication (which when realised early on, could help you enable your team by breaking these invisible barriers)

Speaker

Niranjani Manoharan

Engineering Manager, Hippo Insurance

An accomplished software engineering leader in building tools, test infrastructure and improving quality and developer productivity for industry pioneers like Lyft, Pinterest, eBay, Twitter and now at Hippo Insurance.

Niranjani Manoharan, Farah Chabchoub, Jim Holmes

Panel Discussion

What

Panel Discussion

Topics

#learn

#performance

What is “Deconstructing Feedback”?

Description

In this session, our host Laveena Ramchandani, a Software Testing Leader herself, will be joined by three other leaders to discuss ways to become a better leader.

Niranjani Manoharan, born in India and now living in California, is an accomplished software engineering leader in building tools, test infrastructure and improving quality and developer productivity for industry leaders. Check out Niranjani's blog to find out a bit more about her.

Jim Holmes, a leasdership expert in many ways, Jim has experience working with teams across many disciplines (sports, IT, community organizations), which led him to write The Leadership Journey, a practical handbook meant to help you learn how to find a leadership style that works for you. Find out more about Jim by checking out his blog.

Farah Chabchoub an active speaker and member of several tech communities, Farah is also an experienced head of QA and a strategic productivity driver. Learn more about Farah by reading and signing up to her newsletter here.

Speakers

Niranjani Manoharan

Engineering Manager, Hippo Insurance

Farah Chabchoub

Strategic Quality Driver

Strategic quality manager, with a background in engineering, Farah has been particularly interested in innovation and service quality improvement since her first career steps. After an experience of creating from scratch division, scaling it up, and being a member of the management committee within MANGOPAY, since 2021 Farah has been sharing her expertise by advising managers to create excellent products for customer satisfaction. Her diverse experiences as a service quality expert in startups, scale-ups, and large corporations have sparked her passion for product excellence, business risk impact, and productivity. Farah is a critical thinker, solution-oriented with a coaching and continuous improvement approach, and frequently enjoys sharing her enthusiasm with the product and technical communities as a speaker.

Jim Holmes

Director of QA and Performance

Single Dad. Widower. Geek. Veteran. Noobie firearms enthusiast. Around 35 years IT experience. Author of The Leadership Journey. Coffee Roaster. Former Microsoft MVP for ALM. Past President of CodeMash Conference. Diabetic. Liked 5th grade so much he did it twice. One-time setter, middle blocker, and weakside hitter. Blogger (http://FrazzledDad.com). Big fan of naps.

Scott Kenyon

What

Talk

Topics

#communication

Deconstructing Feedback from Old School to New School

Description

Give an overview of what we mean by communication, showing how we can deconstruct communication into simple components.

Showing examples of different feedback models giving the impacts and use cases for them.

How we then tailor our communication to different audiences.

Takeaways

Understand how Feedback can be deconstructed into simple components
Become aware of different feedback models
How different feedback models can impact communication

Speaker

Scott Kenyon

QA & Release Manager

Passionate about communciation and neurodiversity in testing. being diverse myself i bring a difrerent perspective on my own testing I strongly believe in collaborative methods and using different thought techniques and people perspectives to look at things from many angles. communication is about influence and impact we can have on others through testing and how we talk about it. i have moved onto a leadership and mangement role now in addtion I have also taught, coached and mentored people throughout my career. Getting more talented people to come into testing and showcasing there skills.

Scott Kenyon

Interactive Session

What

Interactive Session

Topics

#communication

Taking the Leap to Leadership!

Description

This session will happen during a break for everyone interested in knowing more about how to give feedback.

A session where we take real work examples of things going wrong and give feedback.

Build the feedback live with contributions from the audience to understand how the feedback is built up from components.

Utilising multiple feedback models such as AID(Action/Impact/Do)

Speaker

Scott Kenyon

QA & Release Manager

Kiruthika Ganesan

What

Talk

Topics

#quality

Staff Testing Roles - As Inspired By The "Staff Engineer" Book

Description

This talk is about my experience in leadership. I am someone who didn't want to take this leap for a long time. Reason was to stay technical and not lose those core testing and programming skills. But as I evolved as a tester to someone who wanted to influence Quality in an organisation, being just a tester felt like Stagnant waters. So, I ventured into the running waters taking up the challenge to change the culture.

Now that I have made the leap, I can share my insights on this side of the spectrum. The challenges, the victories and the prep involved. Still consider myself quite a technical person who tests, codes, learns and teaches on a daily basis along with driving the strategic vision from a quality perspective.

Takeaways

Getting ready to be leader as it means to rise above your own needs
Convincing others and finding your first follower
Staying relevant and motivating your team

Speaker

Kiruthika Ganesan

Head of Quality Assurance

I am someone who is passionate about testing and approaches testing with a holistic view. I have over 17 years of experience in the IT industry, working as a tester, developer and a trainer. I believe in the power of people and collaborating to build a safe environment where the teams can thrive and work on creating great software. I enjoy teaching and getting involved in community activities like speaking at conferences, delivering workshops. I am one of the tutors in the Coders Guild and a core member of Synapse QA-a testing community. Also, a keen advocate of Women in Tech initiatives and a global ambassador! When I am not working, I love spending time with my kids and enjoy writing short stories.

Jesper Ottosen

What

Book Suggestion

Topics

#roles

What Weightlifting Taught me About Leadership

Description

This book has made a huge impact on the understanding of my own role - I am not a manager, but a high-level individual contributor.

A Staff role - in the terms of the book. With the lessons and stories from the book, I understand better a leadership career path besides the management track.

A staff-level testing role is often leading delivery teams, critical projects, or internal improvements activities without having formal leadership.

From the stories of similar staff engineers, I can understand elements of leading change around alignment with corporate strategy and presenting to management, among other things.

Speaker

Jesper Ottosen

Senior Advisory Consultant

Jesper primarily works with programs and projects that change the IT landscape of the organization, either by transitioning complete IT services or by transforming the IT solutions for the business to more up-to-date approaches and technologies. Jesper believes that aligning the business drivers and management needs is key to establishing a relevant test strategy. Jesper has recently used Wardley mapping to understand the business needs. He has found it key to create test activities that support organizational needs and business goals to scale. In addition, he has authored multiple leadership resources to help professionals see how making test strategy visible can deepen understanding of the ever-evolving systems landscape.

Jim Holmes

What

Talk

Topics

#coaching

#learn

Description

Sometimes we find fascinating, useful lessons while working at two dramatically different things. Some years ago I started working with a trainer to learn technical Olympic-style weight lifting. Very quickly I found connections between that work and my "day job" helping software delivery teams improve how they created complex systems.

This talk walks through a few parallels and how I found being coached helped me improve my own skill at coaching others. You'll (re)learn concepts such as the importance of having goals, breaking complex tasks into small pieces, getting repetitions in, and remembering that even smart, accomplished people make dumb mistakes.

Takeaways

Leadership lessons come from many sources. Be open to finding gems in odd places
Goals matter. Setting them in one part of life impacts others
Lessons in one walk of life apply to others

Speaker

Jim Holmes

Director of QA and Performance

Found My Ikigai

Veena Devi

What

Book Suggestion

Topics

Ted Lasso Made Me a Better Tech Leader and More Importantly, a Better Person

Description

In this talk, Veena explains what's an Ikigai and how she found hers via the book 'Ikigai (The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life), by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles

Speaker

Veena Devi

QA Architect,Developer Relations Lead

Software Testing Enthusiastic over 18+ yrs Exp.Focusing on Test Automation and Continuous Testing.

Leigh Rathbone

What

Talk

Topics

#learn