Delivering Good Quality With Trainees In Your Team - Maja Schreiner

Talk Description

Working with trainees with no prior testing experience is always an exciting up and down rollercoaster of high expectations, set goals, hard work, emotional reviews and retrospectives and floating quality results. But is it possible to achieve everlasting and good quality of your software products while onboarding new trainees in only few weeks and enabling them to be productive, successful and happy?

Told from the experiences of a test manager and QA lead, working for a company who supports vocational training of the future IT professionals, here comes the story of delivering good quality while coaching new trainees in testing every 6 months. It is namely a must that the trainees change their project every 6 months to gain different needed IT skills during their 4 years' training (programming and application development, networking, databases, system engineering, testing, technical support, etc.).

Maja will present techniques and checks she introduced to solve the problem of doing good testing work while training people on the job. What kind of activities are going on at the same time, what activities she was using to teach people, what risks are there with the approach, what kind of results and problems she had.

You will leave the session knowing how to build trust, do proper time management and accept different personalities and work attitudes. Applying different techniques presented in this session, you will be able to significantly improve your leadership skills, inspire and inject your young team members with a passion for testing and create the base for future QA leads.

Key takeaways:

• How to implement test strategy with trainees and juniors:
  • Balance between operational and strategic tasks
  • Time management
  • Trust
• What problems, hurdles and risks you might encounter with this approach
• How to build a sustainable and successful team
• How much self-confidence and responsibility is needed
• Develop an effective feedback process

By the end of this session, you'll be able to:

Maja

Maja was a speaker at several international conferences:

• Romanian Testing Days 2015
• Online test conference (Spring edition) 2017
• DevOps Days London 2017
• Quest for Quality Dublin 2017
• Lean Agile Scrum Conference Zurich 2017
• Swiss Testing Day Zurich 2018

Maja’s interests also include empowering and connecting women who work in technical and lead roles and for that reason in 2016 she founded the internal Swisscom women community. Being a good role model for her 2 daughters fills her heart with tremendous pride and joy.

You can contact her on Twitter (@majaschreiner) or via her blog (testmotion.wordpress.com).