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Ministry of Testing is committed to providing you with the best possible learning experiences at TestBash UK and beyond! That's why we want to hear directly from you about what topics you're interested in learning about. During this interactive session, you’ll have the chance to shape the direction of upcoming content on our site and the sessions at TestBash 2024. By giving your feedback, you can help us ensure that the learning experiences shared at the Ministry of Testing are relevant to your needs and resonate with your professional aspirations. Join us for this engaging session to voice out the areas, techniques, or topics you're eager to explore next!

Speaker

Callum Akehurst-Ryan

Principal Test Engineer

Throughout my 15+ year career I’ve had a variety of roles as a Test Engineer, Test Lead and Agile coach. As a result I have a well rounded approach to leadership in an Agile environment, both as part of test and the wider team. I specialise in full stack exploratory testing, embedding Agile testing into start-ups and quality reporting.

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Learning Outcomes

• Understand that it is not as hard as it looks
• List of important technical things to consider (and “not that important” ones)
• An understanding that a well-designed test automation framework directly impacts maintainability
• Learn how to get unstuck and be successful

Speaker

Ivan Karaman

Principal Quality Assistance Engineer

Principal QAE during the day, content creator at night. Old, have been doing testing since 2006. Opinions are my own and not always correct ;) If you want to learn more about "how I think", check out my YouTube channel "Ivan and code"!

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We make decisions about what to test and how every single day. But have you ever stopped to wonder why you made each decision you did? What helped (or didn’t help) you to decide your approach? There can be a lot to analyze here!

By applying a testing mindset to the process, you will take your decision-making to the next level. You’ll explore how to use whatever data you have to build better models of your customers and their behaviours. We’ll dive into how all of this can help you to prioritize where to test.  Let’s learn how we can use what we have available to us to make better decisions.

Learning Outcomes

• Explore challenges in decision-making for testing
• Model user behaviour through data
• Prioritize testing activities based on the data and model you have created activities based on the data and model you have created
• Explore decisions made by others that use similar models

Prerequisites

You may need a laptop but if you can’t bring one, don’t worry.

Speaker

Heather Reid

Test Engineer

Heather is currently a Test Engineer at Glofox with 10 years of experience in the software industry working as a developer, software tester and community manager. Testing and helping the software testing community is her passion. When she's not testing she's usually exploring or working on restoration projects.

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In this workshop, we will ask you to reflect on a time when you attempted to persuade someone but were unsuccessful. We will explore concepts and theories from the talk "Moving Cheese: The Art of Persuasion for QA's" and how they can be applied to your previous attempt to enhance your approach.

At the end of the session, you will have a well-planned approach to persuade that person or group if you encounter a similar situation again. The plan will take into consideration:

• Your behaviour while attempting to persuade others
• The challenges that the person or group is facing and how you can help them
• The relationships between the person or group you are trying to influence and others who have an impact on their decisions

Learning Outcomes

• Reflect on scenarios in which influencing is required to improve influencing behaviours
• Establish what sources of power are available to you in your workplace
• Use stakeholder mapping to identify the relationships between the person/people you are looking to persuade
• Plan a deliberate approach to how you might persuade your person or people using sources of power, stakeholder mapping and shared problems

Speaker

Thomas Shipley

Head of QA @ GlobalLogic

Hi. I am Thomas Shipley and I work in Quality Advocacy. My career is focused on understanding what others in a team are doing. The impact of planned work, managing the expectations of stakeholders and analysing development changes. By asking questions of a team I can better understand the impacts of these changes. Understanding more I begin to coach teams. Sharing my expertise in testing with the team so they can start thinking more like testers themselves. I mentor, pair, persuade and promote towards my goal of shared quality ownership. Sometimes this is challenging but often worth it!

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Welcome to the “Inspire as an AMA (Ask Me Anything) Guest” activity! In this group exercise, you will have the identify testing topics you each have expertise in and reflect on their relevance and interest to the community. By the end of this activity, you will not only practice answering questions, but you’ll also have the opportunity to submit an actual application to guest on an AMA webinar, contributing your knowledge to the testing community!

Useful Links

• AMA catalogue to get a clear idea of the format: https://bit.ly/amacatalogue
• The Club forum to see what the community are talking about: https://bit.ly/mottheclub
• MoT search to research your topic: https://www.ministryoftesting.com/search
• Open calls for Contributions at MoT: https://bit.ly/motopencalls

This Activity will run every 30 minutes on both days of the conference in the Activity Room (Mezzanines 1 & 2) on the 1st floor.

Learning Outcomes

• Submitting an AMA application is an opportunity to showcase your expertise, contribute to the community, and foster knowledge-sharing within the software testing industry
• It’s important to Identify topics you’re passionate about and have expertise in to be able to discuss answers effectively during an AMA webinar
• Reflecting on the relevance and interest of your chosen topic to the community ensures your AMA will be valuable and well-attended
• Practising answering questions enhances your ability to deliver comprehensive and insightful responses during a live AMA webinar

Speaker

Sarah Deery

LearningBoss

Sarah Deery is the LearningBoss at Ministry of Testing, she's a scientist turned teacher turned learning technologist. Her main aim is to help software testers turn their vast knowledge and skills into bite-sized chunks suitable for the community to digest. She used to do things in her spare time but now she has a toddler.

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Welcome to the "Run a Masterclass Webinar" activity! In this group exercise, you will develop a captivating masterclass webinar submission to present to the software testing community. Your goal is to create a Masterclass abstract that would give valuable and practical insights to empower fellow testers in their testing endeavours. Get ready to showcase your expertise and make a lasting impact on the community!

Useful Resources:

1. Open calls for Contributions at MoT:  https://bit.ly/motopencalls
2. Learning outcomes guide: https://bit.ly/outcomesguide
3. Writing an abstract guide: https://bit.ly/motabstractguide
4. MoT search for researching your topic: https://bit.ly/motsearch

This Activity will run every 30 minutes on both days of the conference in the Activity Room (Mezzanines 1 & 2) on the 1st floor.

Learning Outcomes

• Mastering the art of delivering webinars allows you to share your expertise and contribute to the growth of the software testing community
• Crafting clear and specific learning outcomes enables you to design a Masterclass that provides actionable knowledge and tangible benefits to attendees
• Highlighting your unique perspectives and real-life examples in your Masterclass webinar makes it more useful and relatable for the audience
• Seeking feedback from peers on your Masterclass before giving the session live enhances the quality and effectiveness of your Masterclass
• To ensure the success of your Masterclass, you’ll need to conduct thorough research, clarify key points, and practice your delivery to captivate and inspire your audience
• Leading a Masterclass can establish you as an authority in your domain, gaining recognition for your expertise and contributions to the testing community

Speaker

Sarah Deery

LearningBoss

Sarah Deery is the LearningBoss at Ministry of Testing, she's a scientist turned teacher turned learning technologist. Her main aim is to help software testers turn their vast knowledge and skills into bite-sized chunks suitable for the community to digest. She used to do things in her spare time but now she has a toddler.

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Welcome to the “Shine at TestBash” activity! In a group, you will create a captivating abstract to submit to TestBash. You will work backwards by defining clear learning outcomes and communicating the value of your topic. Get ready to showcase your knowledge and contribute to the software testing community!

Useful Resources:

• Reasons to speak at TestBash: https://bit.ly/reasonstospeak
• Open calls for Contributions at MoT: https://bit.ly/motopencalls
• TestBash speakers need to know: https://bit.ly/speakerneed2know
• Learning outcomes guide: https://bit.ly/outcomesguide
• Writing an abstract guide: https://bit.ly/motabstractguide&

This Activity will run every 30 minutes on both days of the conference in the Activity Room (Mezzanines 1 & 2) on the 1st floor.

Learning Outcomes

• Using a backwards design process ensures your abstract focuses on the most beneficial aspects of your topic for conference attendees
• Defining clear and specific learning outcomes when creating abstracts for conferences helps your abstract focus on delivering valuable and actionable insights to the audience
• It’s important to highlight the unique perspective, innovative ideas, and practical takeaways that make your topic compelling for conference organisers and attendees
• Seek opportunities to collaborate with the community and seek feedback on your abstract proposals. Engaging in discussions and incorporating diverse perspectives can enhance the quality and clarity of your abstract
• In addition to the steps you’ve taken today, to submit a strong abstract it’d be advisable to conduct research, clarify key points, and get feedback for peers. This will improve your chances of a successful TestBash submission

Speaker

Sarah Deery

LearningBoss

Sarah Deery is the LearningBoss at Ministry of Testing, she's a scientist turned teacher turned learning technologist. Her main aim is to help software testers turn their vast knowledge and skills into bite-sized chunks suitable for the community to digest. She used to do things in her spare time but now she has a toddler.

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Welcome to the “Create Interactive Course Plans" activity! In this activity, you'll have the opportunity to create comprehensive lesson plans using prewritten learning outcomes. A lesson plan makes up the backbone of a course and helps you create engaging and relevant course content. Creating a course showcases your expertise and boosts your credibility and personal brand.

By the end of this activity, you'll be equipped to develop course content and engaging activities that lead to meaningful, active learning experiences. Additionally, you'll have the chance to submit topics for potential course content creation.

Useful Resources:

• Open Calls for Contributions at MoT:  https://bit.ly/motopencalls
• Learning outcomes guide: https://bit.ly/outcomesguide
• MoT example courses https://bit.ly/motcourses

This Activity will run every 30 minutes on both days of the conference in the Activity Room (Mezzanines 1 & 2) on the 1st floor.

Learning Outcomes

• Aligning content and activities with learning outcomes ensures focused and effective lesson plans
• Engaging activities enhance understanding and encourage practical application
• Creating a course gives you a passive income, showcases your expertise, boosts your credibility and personal brand, and opens doors to further professional opportunities
• Developing courses addressing testing community needs empowers growth and knowledge in the community
• Sharing and discussing lesson plans benefits from peer feedback and diverse perspectives

Speaker

Sarah Deery

LearningBoss

Sarah Deery is the LearningBoss at Ministry of Testing, she's a scientist turned teacher turned learning technologist. Her main aim is to help software testers turn their vast knowledge and skills into bite-sized chunks suitable for the community to digest. She used to do things in her spare time but now she has a toddler.

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Welcome to the CodeBreaker Challenge! Put your software knowledge to the test as you uncover Xray testing-related mystery words.

This challenge will not only put your skills to the test but also enhance your understanding of common testing concepts also available in Xray Test Management, allowing you to showcase your expertise.

Can you conquer the challenge and unravel all the words?

This Activity will be repeated on both days at these times:

Learning Outcomes

• Boost your software testing knowledge: This activity presents a unique opportunity to expand your knowledge on software testing but also learn more Xray and its features
• Enhance problem-solving abilities: Sharpen your critical thinking skills as you strategise letter guesses and work to uncover the mysterious words

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Explore how you can build greater awareness as to what sort of influences keep you (and your teams) in your comfort zone, or push you into your stretch and danger zones.

This is a great way to self-reflect on your own behaviours & triggers, but also build empathy for those in your teams and build stronger team dynamics and relationships.

This Activity will repeat itself on Day One at:

• 09:00 AM
• 09:35 AM
• 10:10 AM
• 11:10 AM
• 11:45 AM

PREREQUISITES:

No laptops required.

Learning Outcomes

• Discover what keeps you in your comfort zone and your triggers to push you into your stretch and danger zones
• Learn about other members of your team/group and how their zones differ and why
• How you can use this data to better understand team dynamics and build stronger relationship
• Gain the confidence to take this activity away and run it with your own team

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In this "Unleash Your Testing Insights" group activity, you will create an engaging article outline that shares your testing expertise with the software testing community. Get ready to unlock your writing potential and leave a lasting impression through the power of words.

Useful Resources:

• MoT’s Writers Guide: https://bit.ly/motwritersguide
• Submit your article to MoT: https://bit.ly/motarticlesubmission
• MoT search for researching your topic: https://bit.ly/motsearch
• Open calls for Contributions at MoT: https://bit.ly/motopencalls

This Activity will run every 30-minutes on both days of the conference in the Activity Room (Mezzanines 1 & 2) on the 1st floor.

Learning Outcomes

• Choose a software testing topic that you are passionate about, have knowledge of, and is relevant to a substantial target audience. Aim for a balance between uniqueness and popularity
• Identifying the appropriate target audience helps tailor your article's content and language to effectively engage and communicate with readers
• Pay attention to the structure of your article outline, including the opening, body paragraphs, and conclusion. Ensure a logical flow and coherence in presenting your insights and ideas
• Strive to bring fresh perspectives, innovative approaches, or unique insights to your article outline, making it stand out and captivate readers
• Conducting in-depth research on your chosen topic is crucial for a high-quality article

Speaker

Sarah Deery

LearningBoss

Sarah Deery is the LearningBoss at Ministry of Testing, she's a scientist turned teacher turned learning technologist. Her main aim is to help software testers turn their vast knowledge and skills into bite-sized chunks suitable for the community to digest. She used to do things in her spare time but now she has a toddler.

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We'll literally put the pen in pen testing as we look at finding security bugs in a demo site.

You don’t need years of training to perform security testing. Armed with nothing but pen, paper and a tester’s mindset we can find a bunch of bugs. Imagine what you can do next time you are testing your application, armed with tools and the confidence to test for security?

Resources:

• Rich’s Security Cheat Sheet - https://www.r-adams.co.uk/security-cheat-sheet/

• PortSwigger's Web Security Academy - https://portswigger.net/web-security/learning-path

• The Bittersweetness of Security Testing - Anne Oikarinen https://www.ministryoftesting.com/testbash-talks/0884a50d?s_id=15362297

• But I'm Not A Security Tester! Security Testing On The Web For The Rest Of Us https://www.ministryoftesting.com/articles/1c69b871?s_id=15362297

Learning Outcomes

• Security testing is something that every tester can perform
• Basic “pen testing” can be part of our exploratory testing
• The developer tools within our browsers can be great tools
• Software relying on client side validation may give you bugs galore

Speaker

Richard Adams

Senior Test Engineer

After my first full time job as a games tester, I've had a varied career from Gameplay Systems Designer to Software Engineer for security systems with a couple of roles in between. I've since returned to testing as I have a huge passion for testing and just love finding bugs! As well as being a Senior Test Engineer, I am also a Cyber Champion within my organisation. This means that I help drive good security practices and in particular I love getting the team involved in threat modelling. I also get free training on all things security! Out of work I love gaming and carrying on my interest in threat modelling, I have also created a card game called Threat Agents.

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Testionary is the ultimate combination of Pictionary and software testing.

Challenge your teammates to this sketching game where your drawing skills and software testing vocabulary will be put to the test.

Join us in this fun and engaging activity that improves communication, boosts testing knowledge, and stimulates teamwork!

Get ready to play Testionary and discover who can master the art of drawing software testing concepts!

This Activity will be repeated on both days at these times:

Learning Outcomes

• Strengthen Knowledge: Reinforce understanding of software testing concepts, terminology, and methodologies through interactive and enjoyable gameplay
• Improve Communication: Enhance your communication skills and creative thinking
• Teamwork and Collaboration: Testionary promotes teamwork and collaboration among software testing teams, encouraging effective collaboration and leveraging the expertise of team members

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Join not one not two but three Quality Engineers from Lloyds Banking Group (LBG), as they kick off this amazing testing conference by talking about their professional growth, and the many different paths they've trodden in their squiggly careers so far.

Whether it’s a complete career change, upskilling into a new role or harnessing the software testing community to power your growth, Andrea Dolan-Hughes, Charlotte Gaynor and Beth Marshall will cover different strategies used to support the careers of Quality Engineers at LBG, as well as highlighting some personal tips, tricks and things to consider trying out yourselves.

Learning Outcomes

• Learn strategies for improving skills and the development of Quality Engineers
• Be inspired by stories of very different careers all in the testing space
• Tried and tested personal tips and tricks for enhancing your own learning journey

Speakers

Beth Marshall

Senior Quality Engineer

Beth has been testing for the past 15 years, and has recently joined Lloyds Banking Group as Senior Quality Engineer. Based in Leeds, Beth is a proud member of the global software testing community, and a regular blogger. Talk to her about Software Testing Portfolios, API Testing/Postman and supporting Women in Tech!

Charlotte Gaynor

Senior Quality Engineer

I am a Quality Engineer in Lloyds Banking Group. I have worked at LBG for 5 years within the centre of excellence team supporting all QE's across the bank. Most recently working on test automation frameworks in Selenium, Playwright and UFT and helping to create and deliver training. Prior to this I worked for MBNA as a software tester in a delivery role for approx 15 years. I am currently in the 3rd year of a 4 year degree apprencticeship course in Software Engineering at Manchester metropolitan university funded by LBG, which has enabled me to upskill into a more technical role. I am 47 years old, married and I have 2 children aged 18 and 15.

Andrea Dolan

Quality Engineer

I have been a Quality Engineer at Lloyds Banking Group since February 2023. Before that I worked in mainly retail roles. For many years with Lloyds Banking Group (8 to be exact!) I had been really passionate about expanding my career in Tech within the Group, and in November 2022 I was given that opportunity. Interested in Automation and API testing as part of my continuous development.

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Accessibility is an often forgotten or unconsidered system quality criteria or non-functional requirement. What many might not know is that 15% of the world's population has some form of disability.  WeThe15 is the biggest ever human rights movement to end discrimination towards the world’s 1.2 billion persons with disabilities who represent 15% of the global population. (https://www.wethe15.org/

There will also be a brief introduction to Charters. These are the “unwritten rules” all teams have when looking at ways of working and software delivery.

Then focusing on what is a accessibility charter and why it's one of the most important ones to have in your toolkit.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the basics of accessibility
• Understand the basics of what Charters are
• Learn how an Accessibility Charter can be invaluable to your level of quality

Speakers

Ady Stokes

Quality Engineering Architect

@A11y_Ady on Twitter. Passionate about accessibility, exploring and testing as part of the creation and development of software. I help teams build better software and I strongly believe in collaborative methods and using different thought techniques and people perspectives to look at things from many angles. Accessibility is about inclusion, not just disability. In my career I’ve been a Director. Test, BI and Logistics Manager. Tester, Test Engineer, QA, Site Lead Tester, Quality Engineering Architect and any other value adding role required at the time. I have also taught, coached and mentored people throughout my career. My career highlight is creating the Software Tester Apprenticeship for the Coders Guild and training people to get their first role in IT through government sponsored free training courses based on my apprenticeship. I have my own blog at The Big Test Theory.com sharing my thoughts, occasional poetry and my Periodic Table of Testing, a visual heuristic showing the breadth of the testing universe.

Scott Kenyon

Freelance Digital Delivery Trainer

My name is Scott , I have been part of the testing community for many years focusing on communication and neurodiversity in testing. being diverse myself i bring a different perspective on my own testing I strongly believe in collaborative methods and using different thought techniques and people's perspectives to look at things from many angles. Communication is about the influence and impact we can have on others through testing and how we talk about it. I now coach and teach testing and digital management to lots of people across the full spectrum of software delivery. I have pioneered and developed the use of Charters across the digital workspace to enable clean and efficient ways of working.

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In this session you will try out a variety of tests in Postman (including the recently released Performance Testing feature), demonstrating how you can build robust test suites for your APIs.
You'll author some test scripts, automate tests, and dynamically control workflows using the collection runner and scheduled monitors.

Resources

• Postman Intergalactic: postman.com/events/intergalactic

Series of educational training taught by your favorite Postman team members with a live Q&A at the end of every session.

• 30 Days of Postman: go.pstmn.io/30-days-postman

Improve your skills by tackling a new Postman challenge for 30 days in a row.

• Postman’s Learning Center: learning.postman.com

Learning Outcomes

• Author scripts to test API request responses
• Run collections via the collection runner in Postman
• Use scripts and variables to pass data between requests
• Use dynamic variables and/or mock servers to automate request data generation

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Learning Outcomes

• How to use the DORA key metrics to create a shared understanding of speed and quality
• How to identify bottlenecks to speed and quality using the Theory of Constraints
• Five core skills to enable practical experimentation in teams

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

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Many people think that designing and creating a pipeline is something that belongs to the "too hard" bucket. They say "It belongs to Developers or SREs!". But is it?

In this workshop we are going to use an app with a prepared set of tests to:

• Design a pipeline
• Prepare scripts to match and run specific tests (for different types of tests, like "UI smoke test", "API tests", and/or others)
• Create a pipeline on the "GitHub Actions" to run tests

Learning Outcomes

• Design a pipeline for the given Web App and its tests
• Prepare scripts to match specific test files
• Create a pipeline for your tests using the "GitHub Actions"

Prerequisites

Must have:

• GitHub account to fork the repository (link will be provided) and host the pipeline
• Installed Node.js (LTS version) to run tests locally

Check here for the versions (by default go with v18): https://nodejs.dev/en/about/releases/

Validated if installed correctly: run "node -v" in your terminal. If you see v18.X.X then you installed it correctly.

Nice to have:

• Previous experience with any of the test frameworks (we're going to build a pipeline for the app with Cypress and Jest tests)

Speaker

Ivan Karaman

Principal Quality Assistance Engineer

Principal QAE during the day, content creator at night. Old, have been doing testing since 2006. Opinions are my own and not always correct ;) If you want to learn more about "how I think", check out my YouTube channel "Ivan and code"!

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End-to-end tests are really good testing solutions that provide greater confidence in the system that it tests. They are also the most commonly used form of tests when it comes to test automation. It is also pretty straightforward to get started with them.

But as software systems grow and become complex, your tests also become complex. Most of all, they become… costly, very soon. In order to overcome this complexity, in this workshop, we will look at how we can break down a single e2e testing into multiple low level tests through a pattern called hermetic test.

A hermetic test is a test that is completely self-sufficient. It is fully independent, therefore every time a test is run, you are absolutely sure that a failure is a real failure, and has nothing to do with a dependency going wrong.

In this workshop, we will go through a journey of achieving what we want by:

1. Running and understanding an e2e test
2. On paper, breakdown this test into meaningful and efficient low level tests (pact, API test, etc)
3. Set up, write and run these low level tests
4. Discuss our journey with our peers to get different perspectives

Get ready to break your tests…

Learning Outcomes

• Outline what hermetic testing is by looking at various examples
• Execute an end-to-end test using playwright and understand the different types of cost associated with it
• De-construct an e2e test into multiple lower level tests through hermetic testing principles
• Reflect on the value add that hermetic testing allows us to achieve

Prerequisites

The main prerequisite is to set up Mark Winteringham’s Restful-Booker platform on your own machine.

Optional viewing/reading

• TestBash Talk - Hermetic UI Test
• Blog on Hermetic testing

Speaker

Jaswanth Manigundan

Staff Quality Coach, Culture Amp

I’m Jas from Melbourne. I currently work at Culture Amp as a Staff Quality Coach, specialising in test automation and testability. I have worked in the mobile app development space for almost a decade, where I saw mobile devices and operating systems get better and better by the day. My fascination towards mobile devices made me start my professional career as a mobile app developer. But my quest to build better apps and write code that is much more testable lead me to transition into a test automation engineer specialising in mobile. Since then, I’ve gradually explored a wide variety of test automation frameworks and have consulted for some of the leading software teams in Australia to build efficient test automation suites for both mobile and web apps. I have spoken about my test automation journey in a variety of testing conferences like the Ministry of Testing’s Testbashes, Automation Guild (by TestGuild) and Saucelabs’ Saucecon. I now work at Culture Amp alongside the legendary Anne-Marie Charrett helping build a passionate quality enablement team. I currently work with test automation frameworks (functionality, contract and load) for APIs, web apps, micro-services and event sourced systems. Latest obsession… Observability within test frameworks.

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Every day we read stories about Global warming, climate change or the Climate Emergency. Temperatures are soaring around the globe with some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded on our tiny blue dot being reported every other month. What can we do about it, what can testers do? It turns out quite a lot! Testers are often seen as advocates for the customer, be that in ensuring that a system does what we hope it will or that it is accessible to all our users. We can be the same here, we can be advocates for our planet and we can ask a simple question, what are we doing to make this more sustainable?

Join the Lloyd's Banking Group Quality Engineering Centre of Excellence as we ask the question "What bananas have to do with software testing"? This fun activity will explore different aspects of testing and their impact on our environment.

As well as help you develop an approach to understand the environmental impact of testing practices in your organisations and some key changes you can take forward.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the environmental impacts from software development and test
• Identify key areas where changes can be made
• Discover simple strategies that can be put in place to make your testing more sustainable and more effective

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Have your opportunity to ask not one not two but three Quality Engineers from Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) anything about their professional growth, and the many different paths they've trodden in their squiggly careers so far.

From a complete career change, upskilling into a new role or harnessing the software testing community to power your growth, Andrea Dolan-Hughes, Charlotte Gaynor and Beth Marshall will cover different strategies used support the careers of Quality Engineers at LBG, as well as highlighting some personal tips, tricks and things to consider trying out yourselves. Come and discuss what they have learned and share your own journey too.

Learning Outcomes

• Learn strategies for improving skills and the development of Quality Engineers
• Be inspired by stories of very different careers all in the testing space
• Tried and tested personal tips and tricks for enhancing your own learning journey

Speakers

Beth Marshall

Senior Quality Engineer

Beth has been testing for the past 15 years, and has recently joined Lloyds Banking Group as Senior Quality Engineer. Based in Leeds, Beth is a proud member of the global software testing community, and a regular blogger. Talk to her about Software Testing Portfolios, API Testing/Postman and supporting Women in Tech!

Charlotte Gaynor

Senior Quality Engineer

I am a Quality Engineer in Lloyds Banking Group. I have worked at LBG for 5 years within the centre of excellence team supporting all QE's across the bank. Most recently working on test automation frameworks in Selenium, Playwright and UFT and helping to create and deliver training. Prior to this I worked for MBNA as a software tester in a delivery role for approx 15 years. I am currently in the 3rd year of a 4 year degree apprencticeship course in Software Engineering at Manchester metropolitan university funded by LBG, which has enabled me to upskill into a more technical role. I am 47 years old, married and I have 2 children aged 18 and 15.

Andrea Dolan

Quality Engineer

I have been a Quality Engineer at Lloyds Banking Group since February 2023. Before that I worked in mainly retail roles. For many years with Lloyds Banking Group (8 to be exact!) I had been really passionate about expanding my career in Tech within the Group, and in November 2022 I was given that opportunity. Interested in Automation and API testing as part of my continuous development.

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Would Heu-risk it - Lightning Mode lets you reflect on situations in your past work life and how you could use heuristics like these cards to explore your own, your team’s and your application’s strengths and weak spots.

Reflecting on our work, our strengths and weak points can be intimidating, but it’s the way we grow and become better. Using focal points like for example Would Heu-risk it, TestSphere, can help trigger new thoughts and discover new perspectives. Sharing and discussing in a group, hopefully diverse, is a great way of adding more angles and seeing things we were unaware of ourselves.

Resources:

• Question Able by Pejgan
• TestSphere
• Would Heu-risk it Cards
• Would Heu-risk it Book

Learning Outcomes

• How to uncover strengths and weak points (your own, your team, your application)
• How you could use games or focal points to come up with new ideas
• How using reflection as a structure can help you unblock yourself and grow new skills
• How sharing in group can add new perspectives

Speaker

Lena Nyström

Engineering manager, Author and Public Speaker

Lena has been building software since 1999. After a decade of coding they found their heart in testing and that is close to their heart even today when they focus on building organisations and growing people rather than the software itself. Continuous improvement is a core value and they believe we should all strive to keep up to date and challenge ourselves, our assumptions and the way things are done. Lena is the author and creator of "Would Heu-risk it?" (card deck and book), avid blogger, speaker and workshop facilitator. On top of that, Lena combines skills learned through the years in their day job as Engineering Manager. Lena lives outside of Stockholm, Sweden with teenage kids, partner and way too much games, sewing machines and books.

What

Topics

Description

UI testing is a common practice. A common way to test UI is during end-to-end testing. However, as modern software is focused on the concept of components, it opens a new way of testing components: in isolation. That is to say, each component is tested separately without the need to spin the whole system.

In this activity, we will break an app into components and define tests per component.

Explore the application code in one of the implementations to see the break into components. Understand the difference between UI component testing and e2e testing.

Learning Outcomes

• Modern web apps are built from components
• Components can and should be tested in isolation
• Different aspects of testing components in isolation

Speaker

Tally Barak

Software Architect

Tally has over 30 years of software development, product management, and consulting experience. Today Tally works for Yoobic as an architect responsible for all the Frontend tooling, testing, and DevOps processes. Tally loves Javascript and its ecosystem and is happily sharing this knowledge with other developers. Playwright Ambassador.

What

Topics

Description

How would William Shakespeare have familiarized himself with a new piece of software?

In this 30-minute session, we will delve into the depths of software analysis as a band of poets.

Let’s explore how poets unravel the essence of their subjects, uncovering hidden layers and untold stories. We’ll discover how these analytical skills translate to analyzing software.

Through collaborative mind mapping, we will analyze a web application and visually map our collective insights, providing a dynamic framework for our discussions.

To ignite your artistic spirit, we will embark on a poetic journey, crafting unique and expressive poems inspired by the mind map.

Learning Outcomes

• Deep analysis of a product’s components and capabilities can yield tremendous insights about its usefulness
• Product design can lead a user to expect to feel a certain way while using it, providing an alternative layer of purpose to be discovered
• When we analyze the world through a personal lens we might read ulterior motivations behind design choices, leading to interesting use cases
• Anyone who can slow down and really look at a thing in the world can write a poem!

Speaker

Phil Wells

Senior Software Engineer

Phil Wells has been a software quality practitioner for over a decade. Now, Phil is a senior software engineer with Epic Games. His team builds shared services to help developers get their systems tested and delivered safely. Phil likes to go beyond writing tests and building infrastructure for delivery. He also acts as a coach for his peers in web development, teaching and advocating for modern test practices and technologies. People have all sorts of funny ideas about what Phil does every day. Phil does not play Fortnite all day. Phil lives in the hills of New Jersey, USA. He has three little kids who also do not play Fortnite all day.

What

Topics

Description

Will the next Indiana Jones uncover the Holy Grail of Testing?

What is it anyway?

What makes us chase that artefact?

Is there any way of making testing perfect in all that it embraces?

Let's dive into it together!

Learning Outcomes

• Learn about what it would mean to have a Holy Grail in testing
• Become aware of some the illusions we have in testing that may affect the success of our quest
• Uncover pitfalls of some “breakthrough” technologies for testing
• Disclose how we can make better testing, already today!

Speaker

Sergio Freire

Solution Architect and Testing Advocate

Sergio Freire is a Solution Architect and Testing Advocate, working closely with many teams worldwide from distinct yet highly demanding sectors (Automotive, Health, and Telco among others) to help them achieve great, high-quality, testable products. By understanding how organizations work, their needs, context and background, processes and quality can be improved, while development and testing can "merge" towards a common goal: provide the best product that stakeholders need.

What

Topics

Description

Elevator Pitch

Abstract

• Using local arrangements to make the employee’s contract more supportive
  • Annualised hours
  • Story points for effort instead of monitoring hours.
• Touching base frequently - offering little ways to support
• Explanation of what my managers have done that made working in their teams better.

• Not separating disability time off from sick leave

• Clock Watching is the worst!
• Bradford Score/ Bradford Factor

• Offering to give real-life experience of our jobs to groups at job fair/the job centre
• Encouraging people to reach out to online communities. Storytelling how I have approached my online communities and how two individuals were inspired to approach me.

• Tell the success story of my two recruits and how they now earn more money than I do.
• Even now I am growing and becoming even more awesome. In the past six months, I have realised:
  • I am not on the chopping block every day
  • I want to support those who support me
  • That I can take some time to learn, 
  • That I don’t need to do every “extra” and I can say NO! 
• Not losing amazing people due to bad health.
  • Support makes the employee relax and not hit burnout
  • Support allows the employee to manage their own health and expectations of you as a manager
  • Retaining important people with experiences and knowledge no one else has
• Reduce sickness absence levels and early ill-health retirements

Learning Outcomes

• How to make your working environment and culture work for you as a person living with a disability. Manage your Manager!
• How to create a supportive and enabling culture, and a place where people with a disability want to work.
• Have a plethora of ideas and methods on how to manage and recruit people with disabilities to allow them to feel enabled.
• Understanding of how to use HR policies to create a supportive rather than restrictive culture.

Speaker

Krys Catterall

Senior Test Analyst

Krys is a Senior Test Analyst with a specialism in exploratory and manual testing. She moved into the test industry in 2019 and is an advocate for people with disabilities. You can often find her surrounded by gadgetry and geeky objects as she is a self proclaimed nerdy geek. Born in Australia she has an odd sense of humour and has made some hilarious cultural faux pas.

What

Topics

Description

Every day we read stories about Global warming, climate change or the Climate Emergency. Temperatures are soaring around the globe with some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded on our tiny blue dot being reported every other month. What can we do about it, what can testers do? It turns out quite a lot! Testers are often seen as advocates for the customer, be that in ensuring that a system does what we hope it will or that it is accessible to all our users. We can be the same here, we can be advocates for our planet and we can ask a simple question, what are we doing to make this more sustainable?

Join the Lloyd's Banking Group Quality Engineering Centre of Excellence as we ask the question "What bananas have to do with software testing"? This fun activity will explore different aspects of testing and their impact on our environment.

As well as help you develop an approach to understand the environmental impact of testing practices in your organisations and some key changes you can take forward.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the environmental impacts from software development and test
• Identify key areas where changes can be made
• Discover simple strategies that can be put in place to make your testing more sustainable and more effective

What

Topics

Description

Would Heu-risk it - Lightning Mode lets you reflect on situations in your past work life and how you could use heuristics like these cards to explore your own, your team’s and your application’s strengths and weak spots.

Reflecting on our work, our strengths and weak points can be intimidating, but it’s the way we grow and become better. Using focal points like for example Would Heu-risk it, TestSphere, can help trigger new thoughts and discover new perspectives. Sharing and discussing in a group, hopefully diverse, is a great way of adding more angles and seeing things we were unaware of ourselves.

Resources:

• Question Able by Pejgan
• TestSphere
• Would Heu-risk it Cards
• Would Heu-risk it Book

Learning Outcomes

• How to uncover strengths and weak points (your own, your team, your application)
• How you could use games or focal points to come up with new ideas
• How using reflection as a structure can help you unblock yourself and grow new skills
• How sharing in group can add new perspectives

Speaker

Lena Nyström

Engineering manager, Author and Public Speaker

Lena has been building software since 1999. After a decade of coding they found their heart in testing and that is close to their heart even today when they focus on building organisations and growing people rather than the software itself. Continuous improvement is a core value and they believe we should all strive to keep up to date and challenge ourselves, our assumptions and the way things are done. Lena is the author and creator of "Would Heu-risk it?" (card deck and book), avid blogger, speaker and workshop facilitator. On top of that, Lena combines skills learned through the years in their day job as Engineering Manager. Lena lives outside of Stockholm, Sweden with teenage kids, partner and way too much games, sewing machines and books.

What

Topics

Description

Component testing is a discipline somewhat different from typical testing automation.

In this workshop, I will enhance the explanation provided in the talk about what is UI component testing, how it fits the overall testing strategy, and what is required in order to apply it in our organization.

We will experience with storybook implementations and we will build tests on top of an existing storybook.

Learning Outcomes

• Identify components in an application
• Build a test plan for a single component
• Initialise Playwright
• Write web component test on Storybook using Playwright

Prerequisites

• Working knowledge in JavaScript
• Prior experience with web test automation

Speaker

Tally Barak

Software Architect

Tally has over 30 years of software development, product management, and consulting experience. Today Tally works for Yoobic as an architect responsible for all the Frontend tooling, testing, and DevOps processes. Tally loves Javascript and its ecosystem and is happily sharing this knowledge with other developers. Playwright Ambassador.

What

Topics

Description

Teams in software delivery come in all shapes, sizes and methodologies. There are a lot of things they have in common such as tools, documents and processes. They have documents that confirm how they start work on a story called a definition of ready. How they know they are done, a definition of done. Some even have their ceremonies documented such as stand ups, retrospectives etc.

What is also very common in every team is the undocumented or “unwritten rules”.

As the name implies they are not discussed and you should just know them, from someone new coming into the team or with a different neurodiverse background it makes working together just a little more difficult or frustrating at the beginning.

As an example the unwritten rules could be about not taking meetings before 9.15 to accommodate the school run. There are so many others.

In this workshop you will learn all about the unspoken communication that happens between a team. It will cover what you can do to bring these unwritten rules into the light and work better together.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the basics of accessibility
• Understand what Charters are
• Understand what accessibility Charters are
• How they can help your team communicate better
• Experience exercises that you can do with your team
• Learn how to build your own accessibility charter

Speakers

Ady Stokes

Quality Engineering Architect

@A11y_Ady on Twitter. Passionate about accessibility, exploring and testing as part of the creation and development of software. I help teams build better software and I strongly believe in collaborative methods and using different thought techniques and people perspectives to look at things from many angles. Accessibility is about inclusion, not just disability. In my career I’ve been a Director. Test, BI and Logistics Manager. Tester, Test Engineer, QA, Site Lead Tester, Quality Engineering Architect and any other value adding role required at the time. I have also taught, coached and mentored people throughout my career. My career highlight is creating the Software Tester Apprenticeship for the Coders Guild and training people to get their first role in IT through government sponsored free training courses based on my apprenticeship. I have my own blog at The Big Test Theory.com sharing my thoughts, occasional poetry and my Periodic Table of Testing, a visual heuristic showing the breadth of the testing universe.

Scott Kenyon

Freelance Digital Delivery Trainer

My name is Scott , I have been part of the testing community for many years focusing on communication and neurodiversity in testing. being diverse myself i bring a different perspective on my own testing I strongly believe in collaborative methods and using different thought techniques and people's perspectives to look at things from many angles. Communication is about the influence and impact we can have on others through testing and how we talk about it. I now coach and teach testing and digital management to lots of people across the full spectrum of software delivery. I have pioneered and developed the use of Charters across the digital workspace to enable clean and efficient ways of working.

What

Topics

Description

Learning Outcomes

• Participants will think about WebDriver as a tool for something other than just application testing
• Curious minds will learn the story of the New York Times COVID dashboard; how it works and what it accomplished
• Web professionals will consider alternative information-gathering methods for cases when WebDriver is not the best tool in the box

Speaker

Phil Wells

Senior Software Engineer

Phil Wells has been a software quality practitioner for over a decade. Now, Phil is a senior software engineer with Epic Games. His team builds shared services to help developers get their systems tested and delivered safely. Phil likes to go beyond writing tests and building infrastructure for delivery. He also acts as a coach for his peers in web development, teaching and advocating for modern test practices and technologies. People have all sorts of funny ideas about what Phil does every day. Phil does not play Fortnite all day. Phil lives in the hills of New Jersey, USA. He has three little kids who also do not play Fortnite all day.

What

Topics

Description

Open source is something that you have probably heard of, but do you get how and why it works. Join the Lloyds Banking Group Quality Engineering Centre of Excellence as we examine Open Source and Inner source software and how this has been applied to their successful implementation of their automation frameworks. Oh and there is LEGO!

Learning Outcomes

• Gain a general understanding of Open Source software
• Open/Inner Source in the context of Automation
• Explore contribution and how it works

What

Topics

Description

Unlock the secrets of AI in just 30 minutes with us!  Dive deep into the world of open-source LLMs (Large language models). Grasp the essentials of testing AI with hands-on activities comparing conversational AI's and discussing real-world implications. Whether you're AI-curious or a tech enthusiast, join us for a whistle stop tour grasping the marvels of machine learning and gain a deeper understanding of the AI landscape. Ready to be AI-enlightened?

This Activity will repeat itself on Day One at:

• 1:55 PM
• 2:30 PM
• 3:20 PM
• 3:55 PM
• 4:30 PM

PREREQUISITES

Laptop and internet connection are essential.

Learning Outcomes

• A crash-course understanding of open-source LLMs and how they compare to commercial models (E.G Bard or GPT)
• Introduction to key performance metrics in AI testing
• High-level comparison of different AI models and their real-world implications
• Quick insights into the field of AI and its role in quality engineering

What

Topics

Description

Data is incredibly useful for testing, it unlocks a superpower! However, data is often overlooked. That’s why in this activity, we’ll learn how to use data to model user behaviours and uncover risk quickly.

Using data to model our user's behaviours helps us to build a more accurate picture of how our users interact with the products we’re building. It helps us to assess risk better so that we can focus our testing.

Resources:

1. TestSphere https://bit.ly/mot-testsphere

2. Would Heu-risk It? https://bit.ly/heuriskit

3. Questions you can ask to encourage Data Driven Decisions https://heatherreiduff.com/tags/data/

4. Google Analytics Demo account for Google Merchandise Store https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/demoAccount?appstate=/p213025502

Learning Outcomes

• Explore challenges in decision-making for testing
• Model user behaviour through data
• Prioritise testing activities based on the data and model you have created
• Explore decisions made by others that use similar models

Speaker

Heather Reid

Test Engineer

Heather is currently a Test Engineer at Glofox with 10 years of experience in the software industry working as a developer, software tester and community manager. Testing and helping the software testing community is her passion. When she's not testing she's usually exploring or working on restoration projects.

What

Topics

Description

BDD - Behaviour Driven Development - the classic development technique of Given, When (and) Then. A technique that is often adopted by teams when testing. In this session, you will persuade your fellow attendees, in pairs, either that BDD is a good practice that should be more widely adopted or not. We shall review each pair's techniques to see if there are common tips and themes we can learn from.

Through this activity, you will see approaches to persuasion used by fellow attendees and have the opportunity to reflect on them and identify any common themes, approaches and links back to theory.

Resources:

• Selling Teams on Change As a QA: https://tomdriven.dev/change/soft%20skills/2020/03/02/selling-teams-on-change-as-a-qa.html
• Persuasion for Testers: https://satisfice.com/blog/archives/487452
• Aristotle’s Rhetoric: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/#ThreMeanPers
• What Aristotle and Joshua Bell can teach us about persuasion - Conor Neill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2dEuMFR8kw&ab_channel=TED-Ed

Learning Outcomes

• Persuasion is like any other skill - it can be practised
• There are multiple methods we can use to persuade others
• Persuading one person can help you persuade another
• Persuasion only sometimes works! Do you need to persuade someone?

Speaker

Thomas Shipley

Head of QA @ GlobalLogic

Hi. I am Thomas Shipley and I work in Quality Advocacy. My career is focused on understanding what others in a team are doing. The impact of planned work, managing the expectations of stakeholders and analysing development changes. By asking questions of a team I can better understand the impacts of these changes. Understanding more I begin to coach teams. Sharing my expertise in testing with the team so they can start thinking more like testers themselves. I mentor, pair, persuade and promote towards my goal of shared quality ownership. Sometimes this is challenging but often worth it!

What

Topics

Description

For testers who have moved beyond unit testing, it can require herculean efforts to rally an organization to increase test coverage.

Learn how to integrate testing throughout the entire software development lifecycle to shift left and shift right for a comprehensive approach.

Learning Outcomes

• Integrating testing throughout the entire software development lifecycle is essential for comprehensive test coverage
• A combined approach of shift left and shift right can lead to more effective testing efforts

Speaker

Arlémi Turpault

Head of Developer Advocacy

Arlémi Turpault leads Developer Advocacy at Postman, an API platform used by 25M+ people around the world. He started his career as a software engineer doing research and development for Augmented Reality solutions, then naturally turned to developer relations as a deep advocate for great user experiences and access to knowledge. Based in London (UK), and when not interacting with other community members, he can be found reading fantasy books or pretending to be a guitar hero on Rocksmith.

What

Topics

Description

Open source is something that you have probably heard of, but do you get how and why it works. Join the Lloyds Banking Group Quality Engineering Centre of Excellence as we examine Open Source and Inner source software and how this has been applied to their successful implementation of their automation frameworks. Oh and there is LEGO!

Learning Outcomes

• Gain a general understanding of Open Source software
• Open/Inner Source in the context of Automation
• Explore contribution and how it works

What

Topics

Description

In this session you will try out a variety of tests in Postman (including the recently released Performance Testing feature), demonstrating how you can build robust test suites for your APIs.
You'll author some test scripts, automate tests, and dynamically control workflows using the collection runner and scheduled monitors.

Resources

• Postman Intergalactic: postman.com/events/intergalactic

Series of educational training taught by your favorite Postman team members with a live Q&A at the end of every session.

• 30 Days of Postman: go.pstmn.io/30-days-postman

Improve your skills by tackling a new Postman challenge for 30 days in a row.

• Postman’s Learning Center: learning.postman.com

Learning Outcomes

• Author scripts to test API request responses
• Run collections via the collection runner in Postman
• Use scripts and variables to pass data between requests
• Use dynamic variables and/or mock servers to automate request data generation

What

Topics

Description

Learning Outcomes

• The way we're taught to learn at school is based on tradition, not science
• How learning actually works, according to neuroscientists, and how you can leverage this knowledge to your advantage
• With the right approach, there is effectively no limit to what you can learn

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)

What

Topics

Description

High-performing teams don't become high performing by simply being better than others. They get that way because they consciously behave in ways that encourage collaboration and learning while executing.

The five behaviours are:

1. Framing the work

2. Showing fallibility

3. Establishing psychological safety

4. Work across discipline boundaries

5. Learning from failure

This workshop will help you improve your team working skills and become a valuable asset to your engineering teams.

We will use a simple building game to explore five key behaviours that can help you work smarter, encourage collaboration and learning, and ultimately achieve your goals.

Get ready to take your teamwork skills to the next level!

Learning Outcomes

• Use the five behaviours to support effective collaboration in teams
• Convince others to model the five behaviours
• Use the five behaviours to work smarter through experimentation

Prerequisites

A mobile phone is advised, but not essential.

If there are any accessibility requirements, please do let us know.

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

What

Topics

Description

Diversity and inclusion (D&I) are critical priorities that are racing up the corporate agenda.

But are you getting the right to benefit yourself or your organisation?

Let’s discuss how we can build an inclusive workplace where everyone is able to participate and succeed; from employee needs assessments to identifying the benefits of hiring more inclusively.

Learning Outcomes

• Share how disabilities can empower your workplace
• Select from a toolkit of disability management methods to achieve a workplace that supports you
• Explore disability requirements in a meaningful way

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this workshop.

Speaker

Krys Catterall

Senior Test Analyst

Krys is a Senior Test Analyst with a specialism in exploratory and manual testing. She moved into the test industry in 2019 and is an advocate for people with disabilities. You can often find her surrounded by gadgetry and geeky objects as she is a self proclaimed nerdy geek. Born in Australia she has an odd sense of humour and has made some hilarious cultural faux pas.

What

Topics

Description

Would Heu-risk it - Lightning Mode lets you reflect on situations in your past work life and how you could use heuristics like these cards to explore your own, your team’s and your application’s strengths and weak spots.

Reflecting on our work, our strengths and weak points can be intimidating, but it’s the way we grow and become better. Using focal points like for example Would Heu-risk it, TestSphere, can help trigger new thoughts and discover new perspectives. Sharing and discussing in a group, hopefully diverse, is a great way of adding more angles and seeing things we were unaware of ourselves.

Resources:

• Question Able by Pejgan
• TestSphere
• Would Heu-risk it Cards
• Would Heu-risk it Book

Learning Outcomes

• How to uncover strengths and weak points (your own, your team, your application)
• How you could use games or focal points to come up with new ideas
• How using reflection as a structure can help you unblock yourself and grow new skills
• How sharing in group can add new perspectives

Speaker

Lena Nyström

Engineering manager, Author and Public Speaker

Lena has been building software since 1999. After a decade of coding they found their heart in testing and that is close to their heart even today when they focus on building organisations and growing people rather than the software itself. Continuous improvement is a core value and they believe we should all strive to keep up to date and challenge ourselves, our assumptions and the way things are done. Lena is the author and creator of "Would Heu-risk it?" (card deck and book), avid blogger, speaker and workshop facilitator. On top of that, Lena combines skills learned through the years in their day job as Engineering Manager. Lena lives outside of Stockholm, Sweden with teenage kids, partner and way too much games, sewing machines and books.

What

Topics

Description

The first step in defining new behaviour and habit is to understand where we are now and have a clear view of the present moment. The Habit Map is a perfect way of identifying our regular habits, and the likely actions we are to take through the course of the day. Understanding this allows for a clearer intention to be set for a new habit, one that is more realistic, bounded by data and more likely to be achieved.

Exploring your own habits, and developing a map of the things that you do on a regular basis, provide you with a powerful insight into current behaviours and can support your personal development by identifying areas you want to make a change. This will lead to creating a new positive habit (such as a learning habit) and defining a clear intention to achieve it.

Resources:

• The Power Of Habit - James Clear
• Good Habits, Bad Habits - Wendy Wood

Learning Outcomes

• Habit mapping is a useful tool to understand behaviour
• We can use Habit Maps at an individual, team and wider level
• Habit Mapping can lead us to alter behaviour in a more scientific manner
• Habit Mapping allows us to set clear intentions for new behaviour

Speaker

Alex Reynolds

Quality Engineering Community Lead at Lloyds Bank

Quality Engineer in Lloyds banking group, who started off life as a software engineer working on Radar Systems and made the logical move into the finance industry! Alex leads the QE Community in Lloyds bank with over 600 members and an active community of testers and quality engineers. Alex has a love of learning and helping people to learn and develop their own careers. He also has a keen interest in Mindfulness and Meditation and has been practicing for over 25 years. He was one of the founding members of the Mindfulness and Meditation Community in LBG 3 years ago which now boasts over 2500 members.

What

Topics

Description

This activity will help you learn how to break down an end-to-end test. End-to-end tests are an excellent way to enter into test automation. But as your system gets complex, you want to get feedback early and faster. This activity helps you understand how to break them down and will give you a clear mental picture, which is a significant first step through this journey.

End-to-end tests provide us with broader coverage. But once your product and code become complex, it is crucial to understand the costs that you incur with e2e tests. Breaking them down into low-level tests helps you achieve faster feedback and efficiently build pipelines while keeping the coverage that e2e provided.

The hermetic test pattern is a good start for your journey to start breaking down complex end-to-end tests and allows you to reach more robust tests that don't fail due to any unpredictable variables in your system.

Going through this journey, you will also significantly improve on various costs. Some of the essential costs that you will improve on are:

• feedback loop time
• test run times
• complexity
• cognitive load
• ownership
• maintainability

Resources:

• Hermetic test
• Hermetic test in action
• What is pact
• Pact for restful-booker-platform
• A pied piper named “UI test automation” by Abhijeet Vaikar

Learning Outcomes

• End-to-end tests are costly in different ways
• We can achieve the same level of test coverage that e2e tests provide by breaking them down into smaller and faster low-level tests
• We can use a combination of different low-level tests to achieve the coverage of different e2e tests
• Using hermetic tests as a pattern to build your tests can help you achieve robust tests

Speaker

Jaswanth Manigundan

Staff Quality Coach, Culture Amp

I’m Jas from Melbourne. I currently work at Culture Amp as a Staff Quality Coach, specialising in test automation and testability. I have worked in the mobile app development space for almost a decade, where I saw mobile devices and operating systems get better and better by the day. My fascination towards mobile devices made me start my professional career as a mobile app developer. But my quest to build better apps and write code that is much more testable lead me to transition into a test automation engineer specialising in mobile. Since then, I’ve gradually explored a wide variety of test automation frameworks and have consulted for some of the leading software teams in Australia to build efficient test automation suites for both mobile and web apps. I have spoken about my test automation journey in a variety of testing conferences like the Ministry of Testing’s Testbashes, Automation Guild (by TestGuild) and Saucelabs’ Saucecon. I now work at Culture Amp alongside the legendary Anne-Marie Charrett helping build a passionate quality enablement team. I currently work with test automation frameworks (functionality, contract and load) for APIs, web apps, micro-services and event sourced systems. Latest obsession… Observability within test frameworks.

What

Topics

Description

This is a speed mentoring session where participants rotate between different mentors in short time intervals. Participants will be placed in groups of two and will assign themselves either the role of the mentee or the mentor. Mentees engage in brief yet impactful conversations with mentors, who share their expertise, wisdom, and practical strategies.

The speed mentoring game will give each participant a chance to network as it provides participants with access to a diverse pool of experienced professionals with unique insights and knowledge on varying topics. This compact and condensed format will make for a fun but impactful tool for growth.

Learning Outcomes

• Mentorship fosters networking by building connections between the mentor and mentee
• Anyone who has knowledge, skills, and/or experience has the potential to be a mentor
• The smallest bit of knowledge transfer can be quite impactful
• Mentors can also learn from their mentees

Speakers

Tamoya Beckford

Senior Software Developer in Test

Tamoya Beckford is a Senior Software Developer in Test with more than six years of experience in software quality assurance. Through these experiences she has worked on different test projects for web, mobile, desktop and automation testing. As a Senior QA she enjoys: • Revising and improving the QA process and standards, while uncovering new ways to test • Coaching and mentoring other QA Analysts. She enjoys helping people • Leading the test efforts for her team • Being a champion for knowledge sharing and growth Tamoya enjoys crafting, traveling, and exploring new places and cultures.

Davina Scott

QA and Test Analyst

I am an Intermediate QA and Test Analyst at Alessa Cloud Solutions with two years of experience as a QA Analyst and a year as a Developer. During my tenure as Developer, I found myself leaning more toward the quality end of the process and decided to make the transition. I am quite passionate about delivering quality, passing on knowledge, and looking for new ways to learn and evolve. I enjoy traveling, reading, and a little badminton from time to time.

What

Topics

Description

Learning Outcomes

• Learn what XSS, SQL injection and elevation of privilege attacks are
• Know that security testing is something that they can & should be doing
• Be able to identify the "low hanging fruit" security bugs in their software
• Execute penetration tests against an online system (workshop/activity only)

Speaker

Richard Adams

Senior Test Engineer

After my first full time job as a games tester, I've had a varied career from Gameplay Systems Designer to Software Engineer for security systems with a couple of roles in between. I've since returned to testing as I have a huge passion for testing and just love finding bugs! As well as being a Senior Test Engineer, I am also a Cyber Champion within my organisation. This means that I help drive good security practices and in particular I love getting the team involved in threat modelling. I also get free training on all things security! Out of work I love gaming and carrying on my interest in threat modelling, I have also created a card game called Threat Agents.

What

Topics

Description

The first step in defining new behaviour and habit is to understand where we are now and have a clear view of the present moment. The Habit Map is a perfect way of identifying our regular habits, and the likely actions we are to take through the course of the day. Understanding this allows for a clearer intention to be set for a new habit, one that is more realistic, bounded by data and more likely to be achieved.

Exploring your own habits, and developing a map of the things that you do on a regular basis, provide you with a powerful insight into current behaviours and can support your personal development by identifying areas you want to make a change. This will lead to creating a new positive habit (such as a learning habit) and defining a clear intention to achieve it.

Resources:

• The Power Of Habit - James Clear
• Good Habits, Bad Habits - Wendy Wood

Learning Outcomes

• Habit mapping is a useful tool to understand behaviour
• We can use Habit Maps at an individual, team and wider level
• Habit Mapping can lead us to alter behaviour in a more scientific manner
• Habit Mapping allows us to set clear intentions for new behaviour

Speaker

Alex Reynolds

Quality Engineering Community Lead at Lloyds Bank

Quality Engineer in Lloyds banking group, who started off life as a software engineer working on Radar Systems and made the logical move into the finance industry! Alex leads the QE Community in Lloyds bank with over 600 members and an active community of testers and quality engineers. Alex has a love of learning and helping people to learn and develop their own careers. He also has a keen interest in Mindfulness and Meditation and has been practicing for over 25 years. He was one of the founding members of the Mindfulness and Meditation Community in LBG 3 years ago which now boasts over 2500 members.

What

Topics

Description

Would Heu-risk it - Lightning Mode lets you reflect on situations in your past work life and how you could use heuristics like these cards to explore your own, your team’s and your application’s strengths and weak spots.

Reflecting on our work, our strengths and weak points can be intimidating, but it’s the way we grow and become better. Using focal points like for example Would Heu-risk it, TestSphere, can help trigger new thoughts and discover new perspectives. Sharing and discussing in a group, hopefully diverse, is a great way of adding more angles and seeing things we were unaware of ourselves.

Resources:

• Question Able by Pejgan
• TestSphere
• Would Heu-risk it Cards
• Would Heu-risk it Book

Learning Outcomes

• How to uncover strengths and weak points (your own, your team, your application)
• How you could use games or focal points to come up with new ideas
• How using reflection as a structure can help you unblock yourself and grow new skills
• How sharing in group can add new perspectives

Speaker

Lena Nyström

Engineering manager, Author and Public Speaker

Lena has been building software since 1999. After a decade of coding they found their heart in testing and that is close to their heart even today when they focus on building organisations and growing people rather than the software itself. Continuous improvement is a core value and they believe we should all strive to keep up to date and challenge ourselves, our assumptions and the way things are done. Lena is the author and creator of "Would Heu-risk it?" (card deck and book), avid blogger, speaker and workshop facilitator. On top of that, Lena combines skills learned through the years in their day job as Engineering Manager. Lena lives outside of Stockholm, Sweden with teenage kids, partner and way too much games, sewing machines and books.

What

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Description

Over the last 4 years, Dunelms Quality Chapter has grown from around 15 Quality Advocates (QAs) to now close to 70. Whilst this has not been easy, alongside growing the team, there has also been a huge amount of effort gone into creating a mature and hugely successful Quality culture and community for everyone to thrive in and be their best selves.  Over the years, there have been a lot of learnings gained along the way and in this talk, Stuart Day, Jamie Blyth and Harj Kaur will share their top 10 quick-fire tips on how this has been achieved.

Learning Outcomes

• Scaling a successful chapter/community
• Creating an inclusive & psychologically safe environment for people to thrive
• Running Chapter Days & Events

Speakers

Stuart Day

Head of Quality - Dunelm

Software delivery professional with over 23 years of experience as an advocate of delivering high-quality value to customers at speed. I am a Quality Coach, Cert. Agile Coach and international speaker with a wealth of experience in both Agile, Digital and Business Agility transformation. I have a real passion for people and their success. Focusing on enabling and supporting their personal development and their career journeys. Currently, I am the Head of Quality at Dunelm Soft Furnishings, building a Culture of Quality and enabling continuous quality throughout the organisation’s technology landscape

Jamie Blyth

Principal Quality Engineer

👋 Hey, I'm Jamie, and I'm all about the quality game over at Dunelm as their one of their Principal Quality Engineers. 🚀 💡 I firmly believe that quality isn't a step in the process; it's the whole damn journey! 🌐✨ ⚽ Off the clock, I'm a die-hard Norwich City fan. You'll catch me in the stands, rain or shine, cheering on the Canaries! 💚💛 💪 I'm a CrossFit junkie, pushing my limits and embracing the grind. Fitness is my jam, and I'm always down for some workout talk. 🏋️‍♀️ ❄️ When winter hits, you can bet I'm shredding the slopes on my snowboard. Fresh powder and adrenaline rushes are my therapy. 🏂 📩 Whether it's about quality, footie banter, fitness tips, or planning your next snow adventure, slide into my DMs. Let's connect! 🤝 #QualityNerd #OTBC #SweatAndShred generated using chatGPT, don't waste your time writing bios... get AI to do it for you.

Harj Kaur

Tech Environments Manager

What

Topics

Description

Learning Outcomes

• Recognise the importance behind the psychology of speed and performance
• Differentiate between the two angles of waiting
• List various factors that make the wait seem longer and unenjoyable
• Describe why waiting on the web matters
• Outline tips on optimising the psychology of wait time and improving UX even if you can't necessarily do things faster

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.

What

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Description

Every day we read stories about Global warming, climate change or the Climate Emergency. Temperatures are soaring around the globe with some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded on our tiny blue dot being reported every other month. What can we do about it, what can testers do.? It turns out quite a lot! Testers are often seen as advocates for the customer, be that in ensuring that a system does what we hope it will or that it is accessible to all our users. We can be the same here, we can be advocates for our planet and we can ask a simple question, what are we doing to make this more sustainable?

Join the Lloyd's Banking Group Quality Engineering Centre of Excellence as we discuss what strategies you can put in place for your own testing, and an opportunity for you to share insights, ideas and a way forward for a more sustainable testing practice. You don’t need to have attended our “What do Bananas have to do with Software Testing” activity but you may find it helpful.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the environmental impacts from software development and test
• Identify key areas where changes can be made
• Discuss strategies that can be put in place to make your testing more sustainable and more effective

What

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Description

Every day we read stories about Global warming, climate change or the Climate Emergency. Temperatures are soaring around the globe with some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded on our tiny blue dot being reported every other month. What can we do about it, what can testers do? It turns out quite a lot! Testers are often seen as advocates for the customer, be that in ensuring that a system does what we hope it will or that it is accessible to all our users. We can be the same here, we can be advocates for our planet and we can ask a simple question, what are we doing to make this more sustainable?

Join the Lloyd's Banking Group Quality Engineering Centre of Excellence as we ask the question "What bananas have to do with software testing"? This fun activity will explore different aspects of testing and their impact on our environment.

As well as help you develop an approach to understand the environmental impact of testing practices in your organisations and some key changes you can take forward.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the environmental impacts from software development and test
• Identify key areas where changes can be made
• Discover simple strategies that can be put in place to make your testing more sustainable and more effective

What

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Description

Exploration and questioning are two of a QAs most powerful skills, and this activity will put them to the ultimate test as in your groups you will try and guide your Big Trax around a track to the finish line.  Are you ready to face the Big Trax challenge?

This Activity will repeat itself on Day Two only at:

• 09:00 AM
• 09:35 AM
• 10:10 AM
• 11:10 AM
• 11:45 AM
• 1:55 PM
• 2:30 PM

Learning Outcomes

• Collaborating as a group to achieve a common goal, effectively and efficiently
• Learn how to use and apply critical thinking to solve a problem
• How to use probing and open questions to refine a requirement and/or outcome
• Structuring and applying exploratory testing to gain actionable feedback
• Gain understanding of how test conditions can impact the end result
• Most important - have lots of fun 😊

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this activity.

What

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Description

Welcome to the CodeBreaker Challenge! Put your software knowledge to the test as you uncover Xray testing-related mystery words.

This challenge will not only put your skills to the test but also enhance your understanding of common testing concepts also available in Xray Test Management, allowing you to showcase your expertise.

Can you conquer the challenge and unravel all the words?

This Activity will be repeated on both days at these times:

Learning Outcomes

• Boost your software testing knowledge: This activity presents a unique opportunity to expand your knowledge on software testing but also learn more Xray and its features
• Enhance problem-solving abilities: Sharpen your critical thinking skills as you strategise letter guesses and work to uncover the mysterious words

What

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Description

Security testing sounds like it might be best left to the “experts”, whoever they are, but I will help share how we can include it in our day-to-day testing.

We will learn some basic techniques to perform security testing that we can include in our testing toolbox.

Learning Outcomes

• Identify scale of security testing
• Execute common attacks to identify defects
• Categorise security testing techniques as SAST or DAST
• Design test cases or test charters for security testing applicable to their roles

Prerequisites

• No experience in security testing is required.
• Knowledge of Chrome Dev Tools is desirable but not required.
• Laptop or willingness to pair with another person - eek!

Speaker

Richard Adams

Senior Test Engineer

After my first full time job as a games tester, I've had a varied career from Gameplay Systems Designer to Software Engineer for security systems with a couple of roles in between. I've since returned to testing as I have a huge passion for testing and just love finding bugs! As well as being a Senior Test Engineer, I am also a Cyber Champion within my organisation. This means that I help drive good security practices and in particular I love getting the team involved in threat modelling. I also get free training on all things security! Out of work I love gaming and carrying on my interest in threat modelling, I have also created a card game called Threat Agents.

What

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Description

This all sounds wonderful chaps but now what?!

The challenge with Quality Coaching and Engineering roles is that they rely on a lot of interpersonal skills. We’re talking about things like:

• Active listening
• Team building
• Leadership

These are easy things to grasp conceptually but difficult to learn how to do during the day job! Ideally, we’d have really safe, consequence-free environments to practice in. Sadly, most of the time we’re in some kind of high-stakes “live rounds” situation where it feels risky to try these things.
This is where our workshop can come in!

Using the world famous safe MoT environment as a backdrop, we’d like to give people a taste of the coaching and facilitation skills that underpin the quality engineering work. By the end of the workshop, attendees will be able to:

• See how their current approach differs from a quality coaching and quality engineering approach
• Have more options at hand to deal with quality and testing challenges that crop up in their work
• Experience using coaching skills like active listening and open questions
• Use techniques like 1-2-4-All to get all the perspectives of the team out into the open

Learning Outcomes

• Experiment with coaching skills like active listening and open questions
• Use techniques like 1-2-4-All to get all the perspectives of the team out into the open
• Gather new perspectives on existing situations that they’re dealing with at work

Prerequisites

None required.

Speakers

Stuart Day

Head of Quality - Dunelm

Software delivery professional with over 23 years of experience as an advocate of delivering high-quality value to customers at speed. I am a Quality Coach, Cert. Agile Coach and international speaker with a wealth of experience in both Agile, Digital and Business Agility transformation. I have a real passion for people and their success. Focusing on enabling and supporting their personal development and their career journeys. Currently, I am the Head of Quality at Dunelm Soft Furnishings, building a Culture of Quality and enabling continuous quality throughout the organisation’s technology landscape

Vernon Richards

Quality Coach / Senior Quality Engineer

I’m a Quality Coach & Tester that helps orgs, teams & individuals understand the relationship between quality & testing to help them build better products & deliver more effective services. I’ve been testing since 2002 starting with video games on PS2, Xbox & PC. It may not sound like a real job but it’s the truth! By day I’m a Senior Quality Engineer at a health tech night I run Abode of Quality. Here is one of my core values: “The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude (& how you’re thinking) about the problem.” - Captain Jack Sparrow (the part in brackets was my addition though!) I believe that quality & testing problems are actually people problems in disguise! Often the cause of these problems is misaligned goals, different perspectives, low empathy for colleagues, and the list goes on. Using my coaching skills in the quality & testing space, I believe the most effective way to serve the business, is to help teams & individuals gain new perspectives about themselves & their teammates.

What

Topics

Description

Learning Outcomes

• You will be empowered to seek out and ask for access to data
• You will have examples of when data can help your whole team make decisions
• You’ll see how relying on data can help to mitigate huge risks and why relying completely on data is risky too

Speaker

Heather Reid

Test Engineer

Heather is currently a Test Engineer at Glofox with 10 years of experience in the software industry working as a developer, software tester and community manager. Testing and helping the software testing community is her passion. When she's not testing she's usually exploring or working on restoration projects.

What

Topics

Description

The first step in defining new behaviour and habit is to understand where we are now and have a clear view of the present moment. The Habit Map is a perfect way of identifying our regular habits, and the likely actions we are to take through the course of the day. Understanding this allows for a clearer intention to be set for a new habit, one that is more realistic, bounded by data and more likely to be achieved.

Exploring your own habits, and developing a map of the things that you do on a regular basis, provide you with a powerful insight into current behaviours and can support your personal development by identifying areas you want to make a change. This will lead to creating a new positive habit (such as a learning habit) and defining a clear intention to achieve it.

Resources:

• The Power Of Habit - James Clear
• Good Habits, Bad Habits - Wendy Wood

Learning Outcomes

• Habit mapping is a useful tool to understand behaviour
• We can use Habit Maps at an individual, team and wider level
• Habit Mapping can lead us to alter behaviour in a more scientific manner
• Habit Mapping allows us to set clear intentions for new behaviour

Speaker

Alex Reynolds

Quality Engineering Community Lead at Lloyds Bank

Quality Engineer in Lloyds banking group, who started off life as a software engineer working on Radar Systems and made the logical move into the finance industry! Alex leads the QE Community in Lloyds bank with over 600 members and an active community of testers and quality engineers. Alex has a love of learning and helping people to learn and develop their own careers. He also has a keen interest in Mindfulness and Meditation and has been practicing for over 25 years. He was one of the founding members of the Mindfulness and Meditation Community in LBG 3 years ago which now boasts over 2500 members.

What

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Description

Automated tests are code too. Meaning they have flaws and inefficiencies. Just as a bad smell can suggest something is wrong with the food, code smells indicate problems with the code's design or structure. Identifying and addressing code smells is important for the stability, readability, and maintainability of the test code base.

Eliminating code smells improves code quality and clarity. It helps with understanding and maintenance of the tests. When writing code, you should constantly reflect and re-evaluate its quality to see if you are introducing future headaches for yourself and your colleagues.

Resources:

• Cypress best practices - https://bit.ly/cypress-bp

• 5 typical code smells in JavaScript - https://bit.ly/js-5-smells

• Good Cypress Test Syntax - https://bit.ly/good-cypress-test

• …and more JavaScript smell examples - https://bit.ly/more-js-smells

Learning Outcomes

• Removing code smells helps with: Maintainability, Readability and Quality
• Test code is code too

Speaker

Ivan Karaman

Principal Quality Assistance Engineer

Principal QAE during the day, content creator at night. Old, have been doing testing since 2006. Opinions are my own and not always correct ;) If you want to learn more about "how I think", check out my YouTube channel "Ivan and code"!

What

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Description

In this activity, we will learn about the importance of perceived performance and how it differs from objective performance. The perceived performance of your website is how fast the website feels to a user subjectively rather than the actual measure itself. When we think of web performance, we tend to focus on improving the page speed. While page speed is a good indicator and remains an important metric to consider, we should also improve beyond page speed and look at perceived performance.

It is vital that, as software testers, you are equipped to have the necessary skills to understand the psychology behind performance so you can have a new set of oracles to use to help with performance testing. When we talk about web performance, it's common for us to make improvements to make our pages load faster. These improvements are all valuable. However, it's also essential to understand the psychology behind waiting, the human reasons why people don't like to wait, and how our perception of performance is different from the actual performance.

Resources:

• The psychology of waiting lines: https://bit.ly/the-psychology-of-waiting
• Perceived performance: https://bit.ly/perceived-performance-mdn
• Guide on perceived performance: https://bit.ly/guide-to-perceive-performance
• Software testing heuristics: https://bit.ly/software-testing-heuristics

Learning Outcomes

• Time can be measured objectively and subjectively. Users can have different perceptions of waiting even though the objective measure is the same
• Waiting has two phases - active and passive waiting. It is when we are in a passive state that waiting feels unenjoyable
• By employing additional techniques to make your website feel fast to users, you’re ultimately improving their user experience
• Using heuristics, you can develop mental shortcuts to help remember testing for perceived performance

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.

What

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Description

Testionary is the ultimate combination of Pictionary and software testing.

Challenge your teammates to this sketching game where your drawing skills and software testing vocabulary will be put to the test.

Join us in this fun and engaging activity that improves communication, boosts testing knowledge, and stimulates teamwork!

Get ready to play Testionary and discover who can master the art of drawing software testing concepts!

This Activity will be repeated on both days at these times:

Learning Outcomes

• Strengthen Knowledge: Reinforce understanding of software testing concepts, terminology, and methodologies through interactive and enjoyable gameplay
• Improve Communication: Enhance your communication skills and creative thinking
• Teamwork and Collaboration: Testionary promotes teamwork and collaboration among software testing teams, encouraging effective collaboration and leveraging the expertise of team members

What

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Description

• Recognise that persuasion is rooted in understanding people and their motivations.
• Understand why resistance to change is so common and how it can become less scary.
• Develop your own style of persuasion based on foundational principles.
• Have the confidence to sometimes bend the rules a little to show the potential of your idea.
   

Learning Outcomes

• Be more confident discussing ideas they have encountered while attending the conference with their team
• Having a deliberate, structured approach to persuading others of actions they would like to try
• Able to identify more clearly when they might not need to seek permission to try a new idea
• Building consensus within teams to rally around a new concept by identifying potential early supporters

Speaker

Thomas Shipley

Head of QA @ GlobalLogic

Hi. I am Thomas Shipley and I work in Quality Advocacy. My career is focused on understanding what others in a team are doing. The impact of planned work, managing the expectations of stakeholders and analysing development changes. By asking questions of a team I can better understand the impacts of these changes. Understanding more I begin to coach teams. Sharing my expertise in testing with the team so they can start thinking more like testers themselves. I mentor, pair, persuade and promote towards my goal of shared quality ownership. Sometimes this is challenging but often worth it!

What

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Description

In this session you will try out a variety of tests in Postman (including the recently released Performance Testing feature), demonstrating how you can build robust test suites for your APIs.
You'll author some test scripts, automate tests, and dynamically control workflows using the collection runner and scheduled monitors.

Resources

• Postman Intergalactic: postman.com/events/intergalactic

Series of educational training taught by your favorite Postman team members with a live Q&A at the end of every session.

• 30 Days of Postman: go.pstmn.io/30-days-postman

Improve your skills by tackling a new Postman challenge for 30 days in a row.

• Postman’s Learning Center: learning.postman.com

Learning Outcomes

• Author scripts to test API request responses
• Run collections via the collection runner in Postman
• Use scripts and variables to pass data between requests
• Use dynamic variables and/or mock servers to automate request data generation

What

Topics

Description

The first step in defining new behaviour and habit is to understand where we are now and have a clear view of the present moment. The Habit Map is a perfect way of identifying our regular habits, and the likely actions we are to take through the course of the day. Understanding this allows for a clearer intention to be set for a new habit, one that is more realistic, bounded by data and more likely to be achieved.

Exploring your own habits, and developing a map of the things that you do on a regular basis, provide you with a powerful insight into current behaviours and can support your personal development by identifying areas you want to make a change. This will lead to creating a new positive habit (such as a learning habit) and defining a clear intention to achieve it.

Resources:

• The Power Of Habit - James Clear
• Good Habits, Bad Habits - Wendy Wood

Learning Outcomes

• Habit mapping is a useful tool to understand behaviour
• We can use Habit Maps at an individual, team and wider level
• Habit Mapping can lead us to alter behaviour in a more scientific manner
• Habit Mapping allows us to set clear intentions for new behaviour

Speaker

Alex Reynolds

Quality Engineering Community Lead at Lloyds Bank

Quality Engineer in Lloyds banking group, who started off life as a software engineer working on Radar Systems and made the logical move into the finance industry! Alex leads the QE Community in Lloyds bank with over 600 members and an active community of testers and quality engineers. Alex has a love of learning and helping people to learn and develop their own careers. He also has a keen interest in Mindfulness and Meditation and has been practicing for over 25 years. He was one of the founding members of the Mindfulness and Meditation Community in LBG 3 years ago which now boasts over 2500 members.

What

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Description

This introspective session is for testers who want to learn more about the barriers that prevent them from actively contributing to the community. We will explore the often unspoken challenges that can hold testers back from sharing their expertise through articles, talks and workshops. As we collaboratively unearth these barriers and visualise real-time community responses on-screen, you’ll gain actionable insights and a sense of camaraderie.

Speaker

Callum Akehurst-Ryan

Principal Test Engineer

Throughout my 15+ year career I’ve had a variety of roles as a Test Engineer, Test Lead and Agile coach. As a result I have a well rounded approach to leadership in an Agile environment, both as part of test and the wider team. I specialise in full stack exploratory testing, embedding Agile testing into start-ups and quality reporting.

What

Topics

Description

Learning Outcomes

• Learn real-life perspectives from both a previous QA mentor and mentee relationship
• Describe what proper mentorship looks like for software testing professionals and how it can guide persons into the QA space
• Highlight how mentorship can improve the QA mentor as well
• Practical checklist that can be used as a guide for a QA mentorship programme

Speakers

Tamoya Beckford

Senior Software Developer in Test

Tamoya Beckford is a Senior Software Developer in Test with more than six years of experience in software quality assurance. Through these experiences she has worked on different test projects for web, mobile, desktop and automation testing. As a Senior QA she enjoys: • Revising and improving the QA process and standards, while uncovering new ways to test • Coaching and mentoring other QA Analysts. She enjoys helping people • Leading the test efforts for her team • Being a champion for knowledge sharing and growth Tamoya enjoys crafting, traveling, and exploring new places and cultures.

Davina Scott

QA and Test Analyst

I am an Intermediate QA and Test Analyst at Alessa Cloud Solutions with two years of experience as a QA Analyst and a year as a Developer. During my tenure as Developer, I found myself leaning more toward the quality end of the process and decided to make the transition. I am quite passionate about delivering quality, passing on knowledge, and looking for new ways to learn and evolve. I enjoy traveling, reading, and a little badminton from time to time.

What

Topics

Description

We all want to learn new skills and grow in our careers. But do we actually know how to do that effectively and efficiently? Are we using our brains to the best of their learning abilities? Have schools actually taught us how to learn?

In this interactive workshop, we will set on an expedition to begin exploring the uncharted areas in the world of learning and start drafting a map that will help us orient ourselves in it.

Learning Outcomes

• Create a sizeable catalogue of tools and options they can use to aid their learning
• Assess the effectiveness of these tools in each particular situation
• Create a learning strategy using these tools
• Discuss the power of reflection and metacognition

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this workshop.

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)

What

Topics

Description

Unlock the power of web scraping using NodeJS in just 99 minutes.

Bring your laptop and join us for a hands-on workshop where you'll learn the fundamentals of NodeJS and web scraping libraries, and get to apply your new skills in guided exercises.

Get ready to take your web automation game to the next level!

Learning Outcomes

• Use JavaScript to download and parse data from the Internet
• Identify several open source libraries that help developers working with data online
• Write scripts that download, extract, and shape online data

Prerequisites

A laptop is highly recommended.

Ability to edit and run JavaScript files on your local computer using NodeJS.

Speaker

Phil Wells

Senior Software Engineer

Phil Wells has been a software quality practitioner for over a decade. Now, Phil is a senior software engineer with Epic Games. His team builds shared services to help developers get their systems tested and delivered safely. Phil likes to go beyond writing tests and building infrastructure for delivery. He also acts as a coach for his peers in web development, teaching and advocating for modern test practices and technologies. People have all sorts of funny ideas about what Phil does every day. Phil does not play Fortnite all day. Phil lives in the hills of New Jersey, USA. He has three little kids who also do not play Fortnite all day.

What

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Description

Be More Empathetic challenges you to step out of your norm and into another person’s situation. With the use of an empathy map, you’ll learn how to dig deeper and identify the feelings, desires and drivers of people who are neurodiverse or have a disability.

Creating a visual map of a person can help us make sense of the how and why a person responds to a situation. This will help us to communicate with our colleagues in a way that we haven’t before. It can also open us up as testers to think about what our applications are doing and what impacts that can have on our communities.

Resources:

• Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking - https://www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping/
• Supporting Neurodiversity in the Workplace - https://www.aviva.co.uk/business/business-perspectives/expert-view-hub/neurodiversity/
• Acting with Empathy - https://bcbstwelltuned.com/2021/10/01/acting-with-empathy-how-to-interact-with-people-who-have-disabilities/
• How to Be More Empathetic - https://www.nytimes.com/guides/year-of-living-better/how-to-be-more-empathetic

Learning Outcomes

• Understanding and being more empathetic to the struggles of others
• Create a visual depiction of what influences a person
• Opening minds to potentially start mitigating some struggles
• Using an empathy map to further our understanding of people and thus create more diverse tests

Speaker

Krys Catterall

Senior Test Analyst

Krys is a Senior Test Analyst with a specialism in exploratory and manual testing. She moved into the test industry in 2019 and is an advocate for people with disabilities. You can often find her surrounded by gadgetry and geeky objects as she is a self proclaimed nerdy geek. Born in Australia she has an odd sense of humour and has made some hilarious cultural faux pas.

What

Topics

Description

Model your team's ways of working aims to give teams a new and simple tool to help them discuss what they each do, why they do it, and how we all fit into the bigger picture of you building your product. It is likely to be the best thing since sliced bread…

Using a simple example, we will model the process using three different approaches to build a system model. Each stage builds on top of the previous one to illustrate how we see the process from our unique perspective and how combining our models produces the most accurate view of the system.

Learning Outcomes

• Drawing helps us understand the system and makes it shareable
• Sticky Notes helps us to produce better models as we can more easily refine the process
• Group notes produce the best models as we can incorporate the views of others while simultaneously updating our mental models of the process, creating a shared understanding
• Using nodes and the links between them can create a simple systems model to help identify process problems and solutions

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

What

Topics

Description

Open source is something that you have probably heard of, but do you get how and why it works. Join the Lloyds Banking Group Quality Engineering Centre of Excellence as we examine Open Source and Inner source software and how this has been applied to their successful implementation of their automation frameworks. Oh and there is LEGO!

Learning Outcomes

• Gain a general understanding of Open Source software
• Open/Inner Source in the context of Automation
• Explore contribution and how it works

What

Topics

Description

Would Heu-risk it - Lightning Mode lets you reflect on situations in your past work life and how you could use heuristics like these cards to explore your own, your team’s and your application’s strengths and weak spots.

Reflecting on our work, our strengths and weak points can be intimidating, but it’s the way we grow and become better. Using focal points like for example Would Heu-risk it, TestSphere, can help trigger new thoughts and discover new perspectives. Sharing and discussing in a group, hopefully diverse, is a great way of adding more angles and seeing things we were unaware of ourselves.

Resources:

• Question Able by Pejgan
• TestSphere
• Would Heu-risk it Cards
• Would Heu-risk it Book

Learning Outcomes

• How to uncover strengths and weak points (your own, your team, your application)
• How you could use games or focal points to come up with new ideas
• How using reflection as a structure can help you unblock yourself and grow new skills
• How sharing in group can add new perspectives

Speaker

Lena Nyström

Engineering manager, Author and Public Speaker

Lena has been building software since 1999. After a decade of coding they found their heart in testing and that is close to their heart even today when they focus on building organisations and growing people rather than the software itself. Continuous improvement is a core value and they believe we should all strive to keep up to date and challenge ourselves, our assumptions and the way things are done. Lena is the author and creator of "Would Heu-risk it?" (card deck and book), avid blogger, speaker and workshop facilitator. On top of that, Lena combines skills learned through the years in their day job as Engineering Manager. Lena lives outside of Stockholm, Sweden with teenage kids, partner and way too much games, sewing machines and books.

What

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Description

The TestBash Snowball Fight is an interactive activity that allows attendees to learn about different perspectives on software testing and build relationships with other testers.

Here are some of the benefits of taking part:

• Gain exposure to a variety of perspectives on software testing.
• Practice your problem-solving skills.
• Build relationships with other testers.
• Have some fun!

The activity is open to all levels of experience, from beginners to experts. So whether you're new to software testing or you're a seasoned pro, the #TestBash Snowball Fight is a great way to learn and network.

Speaker

Callum Akehurst-Ryan

Principal Test Engineer

Throughout my 15+ year career I’ve had a variety of roles as a Test Engineer, Test Lead and Agile coach. As a result I have a well rounded approach to leadership in an Agile environment, both as part of test and the wider team. I specialise in full stack exploratory testing, embedding Agile testing into start-ups and quality reporting.

What

Topics

Description

Would Heu-risk it - Lightning Mode lets you reflect on situations in your past work life and how you could use heuristics like these cards to explore your own, your team’s and your application’s strengths and weak spots.

Reflecting on our work, our strengths and weak points can be intimidating, but it’s the way we grow and become better. Using focal points like for example Would Heu-risk it, TestSphere, can help trigger new thoughts and discover new perspectives. Sharing and discussing in a group, hopefully diverse, is a great way of adding more angles and seeing things we were unaware of ourselves.

Resources:

• Question Able by Pejgan
• TestSphere
• Would Heu-risk it Cards
• Would Heu-risk it Book

Learning Outcomes

• How to uncover strengths and weak points (your own, your team, your application)
• How you could use games or focal points to come up with new ideas
• How using reflection as a structure can help you unblock yourself and grow new skills
• How sharing in group can add new perspectives

Speaker

Lena Nyström

Engineering manager, Author and Public Speaker

Lena has been building software since 1999. After a decade of coding they found their heart in testing and that is close to their heart even today when they focus on building organisations and growing people rather than the software itself. Continuous improvement is a core value and they believe we should all strive to keep up to date and challenge ourselves, our assumptions and the way things are done. Lena is the author and creator of "Would Heu-risk it?" (card deck and book), avid blogger, speaker and workshop facilitator. On top of that, Lena combines skills learned through the years in their day job as Engineering Manager. Lena lives outside of Stockholm, Sweden with teenage kids, partner and way too much games, sewing machines and books.

What

Topics

Description

Open source is something that you have probably heard of, but do you get how and why it works. Join the Lloyds Banking Group Quality Engineering Centre of Excellence as we examine Open Source and Inner source software and how this has been applied to their successful implementation of their automation frameworks. Oh and there is LEGO!

Learning Outcomes

• Gain a general understanding of Open Source software
• Open/Inner Source in the context of Automation
• Explore contribution and how it works

What

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Description

• Showcase how we broke down our system into pieces 
• Introduced different levels of testing in lower levels. 
• Reused most of the e2e testing work we did
• Demonstrate through real world examples on how it can be done, step by step.  

Learning Outcomes

• Learn the complications of e2e tests as your software grows in complexity
• Understand what a hermetic test
• Step-by-step demo of how to breakdown e2e tests in to more efficient low level tests
• Real world examples of how this has worked in different organisations.

Speaker

Jaswanth Manigundan

Staff Quality Coach, Culture Amp

I’m Jas from Melbourne. I currently work at Culture Amp as a Staff Quality Coach, specialising in test automation and testability. I have worked in the mobile app development space for almost a decade, where I saw mobile devices and operating systems get better and better by the day. My fascination towards mobile devices made me start my professional career as a mobile app developer. But my quest to build better apps and write code that is much more testable lead me to transition into a test automation engineer specialising in mobile. Since then, I’ve gradually explored a wide variety of test automation frameworks and have consulted for some of the leading software teams in Australia to build efficient test automation suites for both mobile and web apps. I have spoken about my test automation journey in a variety of testing conferences like the Ministry of Testing’s Testbashes, Automation Guild (by TestGuild) and Saucelabs’ Saucecon. I now work at Culture Amp alongside the legendary Anne-Marie Charrett helping build a passionate quality enablement team. I currently work with test automation frameworks (functionality, contract and load) for APIs, web apps, micro-services and event sourced systems. Latest obsession… Observability within test frameworks.

What

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Description

This workshop is designed to help testers become effective mentors and mentees by exploring the fundamentals of QA mentorship and providing practical guidance on how to build successful mentoring relationships.

By the end of the workshop, participants will have a solid understanding of what it takes to be an effective mentor or mentee and will have gained practical tools and strategies for building successful mentoring relationships in their own testing careers.

Learning Outcomes

• Identify what a QA mentor should do (the Dos & Don'ts)
• Discuss the QA Mentorship Checklist
• Share real-life perspectives from both a previous QA mentor and mentee relationship

Prerequisites

You will be asked to enter an anonymous poll and for that, you only need a smartphone connected to Wi-Fi.

Speakers

Tamoya Beckford

Senior Software Developer in Test

Tamoya Beckford is a Senior Software Developer in Test with more than six years of experience in software quality assurance. Through these experiences she has worked on different test projects for web, mobile, desktop and automation testing. As a Senior QA she enjoys: • Revising and improving the QA process and standards, while uncovering new ways to test • Coaching and mentoring other QA Analysts. She enjoys helping people • Leading the test efforts for her team • Being a champion for knowledge sharing and growth Tamoya enjoys crafting, traveling, and exploring new places and cultures.

Davina Scott

QA and Test Analyst

I am an Intermediate QA and Test Analyst at Alessa Cloud Solutions with two years of experience as a QA Analyst and a year as a Developer. During my tenure as Developer, I found myself leaning more toward the quality end of the process and decided to make the transition. I am quite passionate about delivering quality, passing on knowledge, and looking for new ways to learn and evolve. I enjoy traveling, reading, and a little badminton from time to time.

What

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Description

Welcome to hands-on with Grafana k6!

This workshop will equip you with the basic skills to understand performance testing principles and introduce performance test automation using k6 in your projects. k6 is an open-source load testing tool that makes performance testing easy and productive for engineering teams. It is free, developer-centric, and extensible.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand performance testing principles
• Build up your technical experience when it comes to performance testing using tools such as k6
• Learn how to write a protocol test using the core k6 HTTP module
• Understand the different features of k6, such as thresholds, checks, and scenarios, to name a few

Prerequisites

To participate in this workshop, you will need to bring your laptop and have the following prerequisites:

• The latest version of Chrome browser installed
• k6 OSS installed locally (https://k6.io/docs/get-started/installation/). This is a must because to participate actively, k6 must be installed in your local machines.
• There will be some coding involved, so, ideally, a basic level of JavaScript is needed. If you just want to follow along, too, that’s perfectly fine.

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.

What

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Description

UI components are now the building blocks of almost any web software. And testing the cornerstone of good software development. And yet, it seems we do not test our components well enough.

Luckily, we start to get many options, some of which are really exciting for testing components.

In this talk, I will review the different options we have for testing components. We will discuss the required setup for setting up components for testing.

We will go over tips on making tests stable, fast, and reliable. And above all - we will look at the tooling options we have for testing components.

Learning Outcomes

• Components testing is different from e2e testing
• You need to build a testing strategy that includes components testing
• Components need to be tested in the browser

Speaker

Tally Barak

Software Architect

Tally has over 30 years of software development, product management, and consulting experience. Today Tally works for Yoobic as an architect responsible for all the Frontend tooling, testing, and DevOps processes. Tally loves Javascript and its ecosystem and is happily sharing this knowledge with other developers. Playwright Ambassador.

What

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Description

Details about this activity coming soon.

Speakers

Ady Stokes

Quality Engineering Architect

@A11y_Ady on Twitter. Passionate about accessibility, exploring and testing as part of the creation and development of software. I help teams build better software and I strongly believe in collaborative methods and using different thought techniques and people perspectives to look at things from many angles. Accessibility is about inclusion, not just disability. In my career I’ve been a Director. Test, BI and Logistics Manager. Tester, Test Engineer, QA, Site Lead Tester, Quality Engineering Architect and any other value adding role required at the time. I have also taught, coached and mentored people throughout my career. My career highlight is creating the Software Tester Apprenticeship for the Coders Guild and training people to get their first role in IT through government sponsored free training courses based on my apprenticeship. I have my own blog at The Big Test Theory.com sharing my thoughts, occasional poetry and my Periodic Table of Testing, a visual heuristic showing the breadth of the testing universe.

Scott Kenyon

Freelance Digital Delivery Trainer

My name is Scott , I have been part of the testing community for many years focusing on communication and neurodiversity in testing. being diverse myself i bring a different perspective on my own testing I strongly believe in collaborative methods and using different thought techniques and people's perspectives to look at things from many angles. Communication is about the influence and impact we can have on others through testing and how we talk about it. I now coach and teach testing and digital management to lots of people across the full spectrum of software delivery. I have pioneered and developed the use of Charters across the digital workspace to enable clean and efficient ways of working.

What

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Description

Every day we read stories about Global warming, climate change or the Climate Emergency. Temperatures are soaring around the globe with some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded on our tiny blue dot being reported every other month. What can we do about it, what can testers do? It turns out quite a lot! Testers are often seen as advocates for the customer, be that in ensuring that a system does what we hope it will or that it is accessible to all our users. We can be the same here, we can be advocates for our planet and we can ask a simple question, what are we doing to make this more sustainable?

Join the Lloyd's Banking Group Quality Engineering Centre of Excellence as we ask the question "What bananas have to do with software testing"? This fun activity will explore different aspects of testing and their impact on our environment.

As well as help you develop an approach to understand the environmental impact of testing practices in your organisations and some key changes you can take forward.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the environmental impacts from software development and test
• Identify key areas where changes can be made
• Discover simple strategies that can be put in place to make your testing more sustainable and more effective

What

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Description

Schools have taught us that the only way to learn is to sit down and listen, sit down and read, sit down and watch a video. And if we don't remember what has been input into our brains then that means we just need to listen harder and read more.
This workshop will give you a first-hand experience of how ineffective passive intake of information really is. What feels like learning might really be just an illusion - the illusion of familiarity. We'll work together on some strategies that will help us retain more of what we want to learn.

Disclaimer: this activity is focused on learning about the skill of learning. The example learning subject we'll be using for this purpose won't be in any way related to testing or software development.

Learning Outcomes

• Don't trust your brain when it tells you it's familiar with the subject you're trying to learn
• Test and evaluate your actual knowledge
• Use tools and techniques for a more active and engaged learning process

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)

What

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Description

This meditative practice is the perfect antidote to a busy life. We'll aim to release tension and calm a busy, possibly overwhelmed mind. 

Help keep continuing your learning by taking some time out to settle your thoughts and focus your mind. 

Speaker

Áine McGovern

MarketingBoss

What

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Description

The world of technological advancements never stands still, and neither does how organisations are leveraging it to be successful and stay ahead of their competitors. Focusing more and more on being able to deliver high quality value to their customer at speed.

There is a continuous evolution, and the speed at which things evolve seem to just get faster and faster. Gone are the days when organisations can wait a few months to get a new value offering out to their customers. In today’s world, that’s just too slow and customers will just go elsewhere.

Those that work in the technology industry therefore must also adapt and evolve themselves, else they run the risk of falling behind and no longer being relevant. This is true for how Test and Quality leadership has had to adapt and evolve over the years to support the rapid changes being seen.

The slow shift from Test leadership to Quality leadership has been in motion for several years now but more recently the role of the Quality Coach is becoming more and more critical in organisations. This is to really help them understand, build, enable and embrace the culture of Quality that is needed to be able to build quality in throughout every aspect of the end-to-end delivery process. Helping everyone understand how their role contributes and the importance of having a quality first mindset.

But what does this mean for more traditional test leadership roles? Do they still have a place? And how do we bring others on the journey?

Well in this talk, Stuart will discuss all of this and more. Sharing his thoughts and experiences having had to adapt and evolve in this exact way over his 14 years in leadership roles and bring others on the journey.

Learning Outcomes

• What is a Quality Coach
• Why is this role so important in today's world
• What are the coaching techniques used
• How to adapt and evolve into a Quality Coach

Speaker

Stuart Day

Head of Quality - Dunelm

Software delivery professional with over 23 years of experience as an advocate of delivering high-quality value to customers at speed. I am a Quality Coach, Cert. Agile Coach and international speaker with a wealth of experience in both Agile, Digital and Business Agility transformation. I have a real passion for people and their success. Focusing on enabling and supporting their personal development and their career journeys. Currently, I am the Head of Quality at Dunelm Soft Furnishings, building a Culture of Quality and enabling continuous quality throughout the organisation’s technology landscape

What

Topics

Description

Every day we read stories about Global warming, climate change or the Climate Emergency. Temperatures are soaring around the globe with some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded on our tiny blue dot being reported every other month. What can we do about it, what can testers do.? It turns out quite a lot! Testers are often seen as advocates for the customer, be that in ensuring that a system does what we hope it will or that it is accessible to all our users. We can be the same here, we can be advocates for our planet and we can ask a simple question, what are we doing to make this more sustainable?

Join the Lloyd's Banking Group Quality Engineering Centre of Excellence as we discuss what strategies you can put in place for your own testing, and an opportunity for you to share insights, ideas and a way forward for a more sustainable testing practice. You don’t need to have attended our “What do Bananas have to do with Software Testing” activity but you may find it helpful.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the environmental impacts from software development and test
• Identify key areas where changes can be made
• Discuss strategies that can be put in place to make your testing more sustainable and more effective

What

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Description

Our TestMaster Richard Bradshaw and sidekick Little Mark Winteringham will challenge contestants and attendees to complete a series of weird and wonderful tasks.

You will need to use all your testing wits and critical thinking skills to beat the TestMaster!

Solve the challenges, delight the TestMaster and win some Ministry of Testing awesome swag!!!

Speakers

Richard Bradshaw

BossBoss

Richard Bradshaw is an experienced tester, consultant and generally a friendly guy. He shares his passion for testing through consulting, training and giving presentation on a variety of topics related to testing. He is a fan of automation that supports testing. With over 10 years testing experience, he has a lot of insights into the world of testing and software development. Richard is a very active member of the testing community, and is currently the FriendlyBoss at The Ministry of Testing. Richard blogs at thefriendlytester.co.uk and tweets as @FriendlyTester. He is also the creator of the YouTube channel, Whiteboard Testing.

Mark Winteringham

OpsBoss

Mark Winteringham is a tester, toolsmith and the Ministry of Testing OpsBoss with over 10 years experience providing testing expertise on award-winning projects across a wide range of technology sectors including BBC, Barclays, UK Government and Thomson Reuters. He is an advocate for modern risk-based testing practices and trains teams in Automation in Testing, Behaviour Driven Development and Exploratory testing techniques. He is also the co-founder of Ministry of Testing Essentials a community raising awareness of careers in testing and improving testing education. You can find him on Twitter @2bittester or at mwtestconsultancy.co.uk / automationintesting.com

What

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Description

It's not a TestBash without 99 Second Talks!

The 99 Second Talks is the attendee's stage, an opportunity for you to come on stage and talk for, that's right, 99 seconds.

You can talk about anything, a testing topic you want to share, a personal experience, or an idea sparked by all the amazing talks, workshops, activities and conversations you've had for the past two days... the stage is yours, for 99 seconds!

This is also a great opportunity for you to kick-start your public speaking experience and/or give it a boost!

Our well-known host Gwen Diagram, will introduce you on stage and start the clock. As soon as the time's up, a noise will be heard and that's it: time's up!