99 Second Talks - TestBash UK 2022 Day 1

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.

Louise is a Senior Automation Tester at PebblePad. Her main job is to review and maintain the automated tests that are run overnight, and investigate the causes of any failures. She has also worked for companies in the e-commerce, scientific research and automotive industries, and runs a personal blog at louisegibbstest.wordpress.com, where she talks about her experiences as a software tester. She enjoys improving her testing skills and her main method for achieving this is by speaking to other Testers and discussing ideas.

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.

My name is Scott , I have been part of the testing community for many years focusing on communication and neurodiversity in testing. being diverse myself i bring a different perspective on my own testing I strongly believe in collaborative methods and using different thought techniques and people's perspectives to look at things from many angles. Communication is about the influence and impact we can have on others through testing and how we talk about it. I now coach and teach testing and digital management to lots of people across the full spectrum of software delivery. I have pioneered and developed the use of Charters across the digital workspace to enable clean and efficient ways of working.

Throughout my 15+ year career I’ve had a variety of roles as a Test Engineer, Test Lead and Agile coach. As a result I have a well rounded approach to leadership in an Agile environment, both as part of test and the wider team. I specialise in full stack exploratory testing, embedding Agile testing into start-ups and quality reporting.