Heleen Van Grootven
Heleen Van Grootven
Testing Engineer
They/them - she/her
After a decade in communications, I switched to testing—turns out that I really like figuring out how things work and how they fit together. Always open to learning more and meeting new people!
🎂 MoTaBirthday | August 8, 2025
Open To
Write
Speak
Meet at MoTaCon 2026
Podcasting
On the 15th of January 2026 myself and Ujjwal Kumar Singh joined a call and pressed record. We were curious to see what would happen. A few weeks later I’d done the same with Neil Taylor and Clare ...
6 Jul
In this week's episode of This Week in Quality, we talked about grief. Grief may be a strange topic to talk about in technology, but I think it's an important one. Much of the industry is shifting....
26 Jun
This is the first time we've had six people with cameras on on the TWiQ stage. Woop! Woop! 🎉Good humans being open and honest about things. Thank you, Judy, for leading the way. 🤩
26 Jun
Today's This Week in Quality had the hosts with their cameras on for the very first time! ... And since I could see them, I was extremely convinced that they could see me as well. Cue lots of emoti...
5 Jun
A major issue hits the production environment. While we want to know what happens next, we need to ask what should've happened before?
20 Jul
The way software development works is uniquely suited to neurodivergence
9 Apr
A thoughtful, vulnerable episode about grief, identity, AI, writing, and the emotional cost of trying to influence quality in organisations that don’t always listen.
26 Jun
With SQEC now fully live, the community swaps stories about new roles, flaky tests, accessibility audits, and why shared language, pairing, and “being the duck” can make quality work easier.
10 Apr
Comments
(8)
Hot take: Don't let AI take notes for you
Excellent insight! The best way for me to retain anything has always been to write it out (preferably by hand). I can look back at my own notes from years ago and understand the structure, abbreviations, leaps of logic, ... , because it's always still *me* who wrote them. I could never learn well from borrowed notes, and AI summaries only magnify that problem. With a (trustworthy) classmate, I could at least rely on them understanding the material. With AI, I have no such guarantees.
(Now, disclaimer: I am someone who loves writing, both the act of turning words into sentences into stories and the physical act of putting pen to paper, so the whole 'writing things for you' aspect of AI is utterly wasted on me.)
Testing meets fun: How we accidentally created the best testing icebreaker using sticky notes and a whiteboard
I read this and immediately pitched it for our upcoming teambuilding!
Don't like my messy desk? Don't look at it 🫣
I'm glad me and my sticky notes were of help to you! It used to bother me, but I've learned that having a clean desk and a functional work environment are mutually exclusive for me, so I've gone all in on the functional work environment (and life environment--I keep all my meds in plain sight because I will straight up forget to take them otherwise).
My biggest issue is, unfortunately, time. Do you have any advice on finding the time to learn when all the work still needs doing and there isn't really room in your working day to focus on automation?
Thank you for answering my question! That sounds like an excellent way to get some time blocked off; I'm going through my calendar right now to find a good timeslot.
AMA about transition from Manual to Automation Tester
My biggest issue is, unfortunately, time. Do you have any advice on finding the time to learn when all the work still needs doing and there isn't really room in your working day to focus on automation?
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