What

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Description

KPI's/OKR's, Speed, Quality, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Communication - the buzzword list goes on, but is there actually any point in many of these buzzwords? And what “buzzword” do I feel is the most important?
VALUE!

How often do testers and quality professionals look at the "Value" of their work before, during, and (importantly!) after they do it? Value to their business, to their department, their team, their career and to themselves?

This talk will run through my thoughts about "Value" as both a hiring manager and as a quality professional.

What do I look for in the candidates I interview, and how can they "sell" their impacts to a potential employer to show what they bring to a business?

How can someone start right now to track their impacts and the value they generate each day, building-up a wealth of real-world examples that they can use to talk confidently in their yearly career growth conversations, in interview settings, and even at conferences with peers.

What strategies did I use as an employee to understand the context and scope of my work and team, and start to understand firstly whether I could generate value in that role, and then how I could use that to drive my career growth?

I'll be sharing experiences and anecdotes from a 19 year career in testing, quality and leadership, painting high-level pictures of responsibilities for folks to map to their own experiences, and talking about the (often hidden!) opportunities to generate Value for themselves, their teams and often the business itself.

Stories like:

• How did thinking about Value help me become a "test team trainer" a year into my testing career?
• How did I manage to be pulled to a product team I wanted to be on (away from a product team I didn't want to be on), using Value?
• How did I persuade my employer to fund a 4 day Rapid Software Testing course? Another story of Value.
• And many more similar Valuable (hah!) stories for folks to think about how they too can tap into Value.

Takeaways

• Real-world examples of different roles and responsibilities and how there's almost always an opportunity to find Value in them.
• Proven methods to track impact and value in daily work (I've helped 3 people to get promoted using these).
• How talking about Value and Impact, with examples can absolutely catapult your career.
• How evaluating Value on a regular basis can truly give your life meaning.

Speaker

David Williams

Software Engineering Manager

Award-Winning International Conference Speaker | Software Testing Veteran | Father | Mental Health First Aider | STEM Ambassador | Humanist | He/Him

Across his 19 years in the field of engineering, quality and testing he's been a web developer, tester, senior, team lead, test manager, head of testing, and has helped businesses to build quality-centric engineering practices and a focus around delivering customer value. He's now leading mobile application engineering at Ada Health, to improve their mobile apps, and to mature their consumer domain's engineering and delivery practices.

We've also seen his award-winning talks at several international testing conferences, including TestBash Brighton, where he spoke about Mental Health in Testing.

What

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Description

How does culture, process and collaboration impact how we deliver software? How can we work together to better improve the quality of our products and the quality of our testing?

In this activity, learners are given different roles and a task to create a Jenga tower. As we work to create a Jenga tower that doesn't fall over, we'll learn how collaboration is the key to success.

Takeaways

• Argue why collaboration is key to improving the quality of our products

Speakers

Amy Hoad

Head of QA Engineering

I've worked in tech for about 10 years, originally starting out as a developer before finding a love for testing. I've remained fairly technical through my testing journey, always keen to pick up new tools and drive automation. Some of my passions are accessibility testing, automation, performance testing, wellbeing, mentoring, collaboration.

Matthew Saunby

Software Tester

I am a manual tester with 7 years experience in testing e-commerce websites.

What

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Description

How do you know which quality aspects matter most for your product? Can you identify which risks endanger those quality aspects? How do we test to make sure those risks don’t happen?

In this activity, you’ll learn how to answer all three of these questions. Using RiskStorming, you'll learn to identify what quality and risk mean to you and your team.

Takeaways

• Determine the priority risks for an application and how to test them

Speaker

Beren Van Daele

Businessman

I lead a company: Isle of IT

Together with like-minded people who value communication and transparency above all else, we wish to grow a company that enables people to be themselves. Experts to the outside, a fellowship on the inside.
Each member has the freedom to pursue their own merit, whatever that looks like, while also bearing a responsibility to the continuation and growth of the company. With full transparency, we aim to facilitate communication between members to find a balance that makes sense for themselves.

I am a Consultant:
I am a consultant who shapes software delivery teams to improve on their work and their understanding of quality. Once a Software Tester, sometimes a Product Owner, I travel around, meeting software crafters all across Europe to learn from and teach.

I create things:

• TestSphere, a testing card game that inspires and supports knowledge sharing
• RiskStorming, a workshop that focusses the team on quality and risks
• RiskStormingOnline.com is RiskStorming for the remote world.

I do conferences:

• BREWT is peer workshop for testers. (organiser)
• ITMatters is a conference for Diversity and Inclusion in IT (support)

What

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Description

In this session you will try out a variety of tests in Postman, 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 - and if you’re still hungry for more you’ll experiment with the CLI collection runner Newman!

What you'll learn in more depth:

• Author scripts to test API request responses.
• Run collections via the collection runner in Postman and/or on the command line using Newman.
• Control the flow of request execution via scripting.
• Use scripts and variables to pass data between requests.
• Use dynamic variables and/or mock servers to automate request data generation.
• Set up monitors to observe API behaviour.

Takeaways

• Ability to leverage Postman API test and automation workflows in their development and deployment pipeline.

Speakers

Danny Dainton

Arlemi Turpault

Head of Advocacy

Senior developer advocate at Postman, the API platform. I started my career as a software engineer working on various types of projects - from mobile applications to research and development for Augmented Reality solutions. I then naturally turned to developer relations as a strong advocate for great user experiences and access to knowledge.

What

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Description

What would you do if you were presented with a system that has no clear inputs and outputs? How would you learn how the system works and how would you test it? One great place to start is by building a model of how the system works.

For this activity, you’ll explore a device using a range of different questions and tools. What you learn will be used to create a visual representation of how the application works. So that you can pick the right testing approaches to learn more.

Takeaways

• Construct a model of an application to help guide testing

Speaker

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

Where do you get your crazy ideas from? As testers we have a mental toolbox of test ideas, but how do we keep it fresh and expand it?

In this activity, learners will come up with as many different test ideas as possible in a short frame of time. We’ll then learn how we can expand our ideas with heuristics to help us identify new ideas to expand our testing.

Takeaways

• Discover new heuristics to expand your testing abilities

Speakers

Wanda Hawkins-Kavanagh

Software Development Engineer In Test (SDET)

I've been a QA since 2008, recently promoted to an SDET. I am passionate about testing and quality first. As an agile enthusiast, I have been heavily involved in the creation and facilitation of local Agile Events. I am co-organiser for Agile Leicester where I have delivered talks and hosted events. Pre covid I was a co-host for the MOT Testing Essentials Meet ups in the Midlands. During covid I learnt a huge amount from my amazing mentor. I now have the skills to be able to create an automation test framework and to build on our android test suite to continue building on quality first in our organisation.

Louise Hirst

Quality Engineer

Hello! I'm Louise a Quality Engineer working for Dunelm. I originally came into the world of Quality when seconded from Store and was encouraged to come along to MoT sessions. In 2019 I became a permanent part of the Quality Chapter within Dunelm and am still learning more and more everyday!

What

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If you could have any person join your team to help you succeed who would they be? What would they be like? and what skills would they have?

In this activity, learners are asked to work together to put together a testing role that would describe their ideal candidate to hire. By working together and empathising with different perspectives we'll learn how to find the right person for the job.

Takeaways

• Collaborate with others to find the right candidates to join your team

Speakers

Bruno Santos

Software QA engineer

I am a Biochemist turned bioinformatician turned software tester. Areas: python, test automation, API testing, life sciences

Simon Rigler

Head of Testing

What

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Description

Gaming is still seen as a bit of a childish hobby and something that’s a fun hobby but ultimately a waste of time. Stereotypes around gamers still paint them as an unhealthy subculture with portrayals showing socially inept, selfish trolls who can’t work with others.

What if I told you that gaming (specifically Dungeons and Dragons) actually helped me to become a better tester and agile team member?

I’ll set the scene by giving a brief introduction to roleplaying games (specifically Dungeons and Dragons) and my history with the game (including my time working with the charity Survivors UK to use roleplaying games as a therapeutic tool).

Talk through the skills that I’ve developed and honed through playing dungeons and dragons as a hobby and how they can be used to become an awesome tester.

• Working as a team; practising how to work together to solve a common goal where people are bringing different skills to the table. Knowing when to push the spotlight onto somebody else because they’re best fit to do something rather than hogging the limelight and being a rockstar.
• Building on ideas; roleplaying is improv which means building on ideas to keep up the creative flow using yes… and techniques. Learning how to actively listen to others and contribute something meaningful rather than just ploughing on with your own thoughts is useful (especially in triforce / story shaping / 3 amigos).
• Try things to solve problems; practising doing experiments in a safe environment to learn that it’s okay to try things. Analysing problems to think outside of the box to creatively solve them. Adapting and changing when your first solution doesn’t work.
• Being charismatic (Only nerds would think of charisma as a magical power); being like a bard and using the awesome power of charisma testing to find the good in something and charm developers.
• Being playful (Quality is serious, testing might not have to be); we can harness the playfulness inherent in gaming to our teams. Whether that be coming up with fun test ideas, finding the joy in gamifying our testing, team building or using otter based mascots to help us lang messages.
• Telling stories; roleplaying is all about the ability to spin an engaging narrative. This carries over to testing where we want to talk to our teams about testing, sell ideas into projects, conduct outreach and debrief testing, where we need to be engaging and compelling with our words.
• Empathy! Trying out being someone else in roleplay gives you practice at putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, you know what else needs that? Testing! We can use the empathy we develop from roleplay to think more about our users and what needs they might have.

Takeaways

• That roleplaying is awesome fun, makes for a great hobby and (hopefully) is something you’d like to try.
• That the skills from our hobbies and extracurricular activities make us more well rounded people and testers, so we should take the time to embrace them.
• Some practical skills from roleplaying games that you can try out to make your testing better.

Speaker

Callum Akehurst-Ryan

Senior QA Tester

I’m an exploratory tester and a kick ass Dungeon Master. I’m also known for my shirts.

What

Description

It's not a TestBash without 99-Second Talks!

The 99-Second Talks is the attendee's stage, a 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, an idea sparked by all the amazing talks you've just listened... the stage is yours, for 99-Seconds!

The host 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!

What

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Description

What better way to finish the day, than with a post-TestBash Meetup?

We will be going up the British Airways i360 pod and enjoying the amazing Brighton views from up in the sky whilst sipping some drinks and munching on some canapes.

This evening is sponsored by our amazing sponsors IQVIA and Postman!