In Conversation with Tribal Qonf Speaker – Mike Talks

In conversation with Mike Talks

To connect our Tribal Qonf Speakers and Audience better, we interviewed our speakers over a few important questions. The conversations we had were just amazing. 

In this edition, we are publishing the Interview we did with Mike Torkelson (Tester, Author & IT Anthropologist). Mike answered many interesting questions and we are sure you will enjoy the read.

Geosley:  Tell us a little bit about what inspired you to become a tester?

Mike: I started to program in the 80s, often copying code for games you’d get from books before going on to make enhancements.
A key part of programming was running it and using it, and both finding and diagnosing issues. That feedback loop of build-use-enhance was a lot of fun, and why games I created evolved.
To me, the joy of code is running it in anger.

Geosley:  What or who has been the greatest influence in your professional life?

Mike: I grew up in a family of engineers. So there’s always been a mindset within our family to be really practical and have a common sense within our field.
We’re not perfect though, my Grandfather was sure the Moon landings were faked.
Just because we have common sense in one field doesn’t mean we have it elsewhere.

Geosley: How are you practicing your skills during COVID-19?

Mike: Are you kidding me? Hahaha …
Oh, you’re serious? Every aspect of working from home is a test scenario. From working out whether to be on VPN for video calls, troubleshooting the video call tech, working out how we test environments that need to be restricted.
Knowing we were likely to WFH, we even ran tests of it before to find issues we could work through before it became critical.

Geosley: What advice would you give budding and existing Testing enthusiasts?

Mike: Have fun!

Geosley: You are an author of many popular testing books. What inspired you in writing these unique creations?

Mike: How To Test – there was a lot of talk about people getting ISTQB to get on the rung to become testers. Usually by companies who’d promise “pay $$$ and you’ve ensured a job”.

I wanted to create an introduction to the craft which focused on the basics at a level of someone new to the industry. And then importantly, make it free.

We thank Mike for his time and energy to do this amazing interview. Stay tuned to hear from more Speakers.  Register to Tribal Qonf happening 27-28 June 2020 here.

Written by

Engineering Manager | Test Automation Evangelist | Certified Agile Leader | AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner | Certified Scrum Master | ISTQB | Banking, Telecom & Learning Domain Specialist.

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