99 Second Talks: Day 2 at TestBash Brighton 2024

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

Gwen Diagram is a technology professional from Leeds who specialises in testing.  She is an avid automation evangelist with a focus on testing complemented by repeatable build processes with monitoring. She has had varied roles throughout her career including Scrum Master at a Start Up, Engineering Manager at a bank and DevOps kid at a large Financial Services organisation. She is currently the Head of Engineering at Glean in Leeds.

As a strong believer in making the tech industry as open and punk as possible, she co-organises a twice yearly free day long testing conference called the Leeds Testing Atelier.  She speaks regularly at local meet-up groups, Agile Yorkshire and Leeds DevOps, duels with creative types at events like the Tech Off, speaks internationally at conferences such as Nordic Testing Days in Tallinn and was the closing keynote at Agile on the Beach in Falmouth, UK in 2018.

Outside of work, you will usually find her hanging around a Natural History Museum somewhere in the world marvelling at how incredibly excellent dinosaurs are, feeding pigeons or ducks or obsessing over transport.

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.

@A11y_Ady on Twitter (X). 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.

Short. Likes cereal and nachos

I've spent the last decade deeply involved in creating and deploying systems for a variety of organizations, from nimble startups to large-scale public and private sector companies. My career has spanned roles as diverse as application support specialist, developer, systems engineer, and team lead, but it's in the realm of Automation Engineering where I've truly thrived. With over ten years dedicated to this specialty, I've also become an active voice in the QA community, sharing knowledge through articles and talks worldwide. Now, I'm embracing a new challenge: transitioning into AI. This move is a natural progression, blending my automation expertise with the exciting possibilities AI offers, and I'm eager to explore how this combination can further enrich our industry.

Fell into testing over a decade ago after getting a temporary job doing UAT and discovered he was actually quite good at it. Made a move into development a couple of years ago after deciding that the best way to build quality in was to do it. Developer at Ministry of Testing.

Former software tester, current scrum master, still passionate about all things quality!

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 Quality Coach, 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.

I am a manual tester with 9 years experience in testing e-commerce websites.

Senior QA @ 3 SIDED CUBE | Tech for Good 💚 | She/Her

Software Quality & Test Engineer Apprentice excited to apply my FMCG experience and passion for problem-solving within Technology. Motorsport geek 🏎🤓 | Proud Dyslexic 🌈♾️ | #TheTestingGame