Mind the Gap (in your thinking) - My day at the British Computing Society in London
20 Jun 2025
On Thursday 19th June, the British Computing Society (BCS) held their annual conference in London for the "Special Interest Group in Software Testing" (SIGiST).
This year I spoke at the conference, reminding the audience once again that you are not your customer. I use having Aphantasia (the inability to visualise) as a tool to question the assumptions that people might make about how we build products and what those products will look like.
While I was there, I had some fantastic conversations with people about their approach to requirements analysis, constructing test plans and asking questions to call out assumptions.
This year I spoke at the conference, reminding the audience once again that you are not your customer. I use having Aphantasia (the inability to visualise) as a tool to question the assumptions that people might make about how we build products and what those products will look like.
While I was there, I had some fantastic conversations with people about their approach to requirements analysis, constructing test plans and asking questions to call out assumptions.
Emily O'Connor
Principal Quality Engineer
She/Her
Passionate software tester, quality engineer and technical leader with a sixth sense for bugs. Avid learner, interested in translating "dev-speak" to enable teams adopt automation and AI-accelerated quality. I believe great software starts with user-focused problem solving, and your CICD pipelines should be powered by atomic automated tests that surface the bugs that PMs actually care about fixing.
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Simon Tomes
It was an excellent talk.
Cool to see this photo montage.
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