Abstract

You’ve heard of a con artist, right? Someone is is an expert at conning people. Well, I’m here to introduce you to a new concept, failure artist. A failure artist is someone who has become an expert in handling failure. I’ve had so many failures I feel I’ve earned the title of failure artist.

Today, I’m going to share with you a story on how I became a motorcycle rider. Riding a motorbike around Australia has always been a secret dream of mine. The only problem was, I didn’t own a motor bike, and I didn’t know how to ride one either! In this talk, I’ll take you through some of the epic failures and the parallels between that and my life as a software tester. I’ll then share my lessons learned and how perception is often half the battle when dealing with failure.

Start up those engines and let a great day of learning begin!

Bio

Anne-Marie excels at creating spaces where quality thrives. As co-founder of Testing Times and its principal quality engineer, Anne-Marie is the lead advocate on quality engineering and how to navigate change and keep quality in the minds of all. Standing her in good stead is her years of experience as Head of Engineering at Tyro Payment, Quality Engineering Consultant and Test Automation Engineer. Anne-Marie’s technical background as an Electronic Engineer has enabled her to speak to both technical and product expertise.  Anne-Marie is an international keynoter having spoken at multiple international conferences. You can read more about her ideas on her blog https://mavericktester.com and/or catch some of her thoughts on Twitter at @charrett.

Abstract

Having a learning disability is more common than you think, but at the same time, it changes the way dyslexic people approach different aspects of life. It initially gave me a tough time in my academics and later in my professional life. Still, once I learned to manage and navigate it, it gave me excellent tools and lessons for thriving in other things in life, especially when it comes to failure. 

This is my story of dealing with failure and understanding my learning patterns to do better in life. I learned how to tinker around and became comfortable with being back to square one. Embracing and leveraging your quirks can be an asset, and that’s what we will talk about! 

Bio

Faiza Yousuf is a technologist with over a decade of experience in building products and teams. She is an award-winning community leader and the force behind WomenInTechPK. She co-founded CodeGirls, a community-funded coding boot camp for girls, and runs the online education program for Blockchain and AI from CryptoChicksPakistan. 

She leads the product development wing at Genetech Solutions and runs a consulting practice as a Product Management Expert. She is a top-rated freelancer on Upwork with the honor to be part of Upwork’s first-ever social impact report. She is also working with [email protected]’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee to improve gender parity in Pakistan’s tech ecosystem. 

Abstract

Abstract

Karen will share a past project experience that came with several challenges – lack of clear objectives, shared understanding of the technical aspects of the work and SMART goals. She will highlight observations and actions she took in an effort to prevent project failure.  The presentation will offer some context of the project but will not identify the client. The failure points will focus on lessons learned and how Project Doom changed the way she now approaches work.

Bio

Karen has been a longtime contributor in software testing. She is a frequent speaker at conferences. She is a contributing author to the book, Beautiful Testing by O’Reilly publishers. She has published numerous articles and blogs about her experiences with software testing. For more on her speaking and writing, see her website: http://www.karennicolejohnson.com.  She is currently employed at Grainger as the Director of Engineering Effectiveness.

Abstract

Stories of #epicfails are pretty common in the performance world during busy times like Thanksgiving shopping when websites go down under load. And it is not limited to just the retail world, we have seen everyone from the likes of streaming companies apologizing on Twitter when their service couldn’t keep up with the demand on the launch of a new season of a popular series to even travel companies that cannot keep up with holiday demands at times. Join Kaushal Dalvi who has spent 10+ years in the performance world as he describes some of the failures he has seen that eventually lead to some of these public meltdowns to make sure you don’t see some of these tell-tale signs in your organization.

Bio

Since he got his first computer at age thirteen, Kaushal Dalvi has been interested in systems and software performance. He spent days researching performance characteristics of different motherboards, CPUs, GPUs, RAM, and disks to configure and overclock them in order to squeeze the maximum frames per second out of the games he played. Kaushal built and maintained websites for local businesses, where he started learning about performance and reliability. He developed a taste for it, and now ten years later he continues working in the same field leading teams that deal with workload modeling, test scripting and execution, bottleneck analysis, debugging, and much more.

Abstract

I’m a fixer. If something is broken or ineffective, I dig in to figure out why and solve the problem. However, not all projects want solutions. They thrive on the dysfunction that rules them.

Through a mix of personal stories & lessons learned, this session will discuss how to deal with being a fixer on projects that don’t want fixing.  

You’ll learn to:

1. Identify when your broken project doesn’t want to be fixed.
2. How to slow down in order to speed up.
3. How to deal with the personal frustration your ‘fixer’ personality can bring.
4. How to change your language so you don’t sound like a Negative Nancy.
5. How to ‘Trick’ even the most broken project into fixes. 

Bio

A passionate Exploratory Test Manager with 19 years of diverse IT experience, Nancy enjoys working with teams that are implementing or enhancing their testing practices and provides adaptive testing approaches to exploratory, context driven, and traditional testing teams. She has coached test teams in various environments and facilitated numerous local and international workshops and presentations. From small scale to multi-million dollar projects; Nancy has played many roles within testing including Project Test Manager, Test Manager, Test Lead and Tester.  Her most recent work has been exclusively with Exploratory Testing implementations at large scale companies.

Abstract

Abstract

Rob Sabourin has been managing software engineering professionals since 1982. Fresh from school, as a recent graduate, with tons of technical programming experience, Rob was charged with managing a development team. As an Engineer, Rob had some knowledge and extensive training. As a manager Rob had no training, no experience, no mentors, no books, and no idea what he was in for! Rob hit his head against many walls as he learned about leadership, through the school of hard knocks, and by the way he continues to do so even today.
In this dynamic, high energy, presentation Rob shares five major, and very formative, mistakes he made and the lessons learned from them.
 Leadership is not a popularity contest.
 Delegate the problem not the solution.
 Technical competence is not enough.
 Identify the right stakeholders.
 Organizations change around you and despite you.

Bio

Rob Sabourin has more than thirty-nine years of management experience leading teams of software development professionals. A highly respected member of the software engineering community, Rob has managed, trained, mentored, and coached thousands of top professionals in the field. He frequently speaks at conferences and writes on software engineering, SQA, testing, management, and internationalization. Rob authored “I am a Bug!”, the popular software testing children’s book; works as an adjunct professor of software engineering at McGill University; and serves as the principal consultant (and president/janitor) of AmiBug.Com, Inc. Contact Rob at [email protected]

Abstract

Have you ever wanted to try a quality coach role? Sam tried one and was let go after 6 months. This talk goes into what went wrong in that process, managing expectations and the hiring process.
This company was trying to scale a quality mindset in its 60+ engineering team with 2 testers.

Bio

Sam is a Test Engineer based in Sydney. She has worked in tech for over 10 years and specialises in mobile app testing. She is the director of BugHunterSam, a company that helps software engineering teams improve their own quality engineering practices. Sam is active in the tech community, she led the Sydney Testers meet-up group for 4 years and runs live exploratory pair testing with people all over the world every Sunday.

Abstract

Abstract

In this Fireside Chat, Lalit will ask many interesting questions around Failures Pradeep experiences in Testing, Leadership, and Business. Pradeep carries decades of experience on all the three fronts we mentioned and you can guess it well how interesting this would be.

Guest: Pradeep Soundararajan

Pradeep Soundararajan is the Chief Servant to Employees and Customers of Moolya Testing, a company he founded. He has been a Tester, Independent Consultant, Test Tool Developer (using Perl), Test Coach, Test Management Consultant, and Product Owner of Testing Tools such as Bugasura.io and whilst wearing a hat as a businessman. Pradeep is the author of the book Buddha in Testing. Too much about him. He is who he is because of the people. He is living a life that can be represented in one word – Ubuntu. Many good people make him.

Linkedin- https://www.linkedin.com/in/testertested/
Twitter- https://twitter.com/testertested

Host: Lalit Bhamare

Lalit is working with XING SE, Germany as Senior Test Engineer. He is the Chief Editor and Co-founder of “Tea-time with Testers” magazine. He is a testing coach and consultant with a specialization in Rapid Software Testing methodology and BBST foundations by AST, USA.

Lalit is also the co-creator of the “State of Testing Survey” project, which is the largest testing survey in the world. He likes helping organizations for onboarding them with Context Driven Testing and provides on-demand consultation around implementing the same at work.

Linkedin- https://www.linkedin.com/in/lalitkumarbhamare/
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Lalitbhamare

Abstract

Many years ago, Stephen Covey said, “Nothing Fails Like Success”. While many have been given credit for the quote, Covey offered his explanation. He explained how people and organizations will find success, and then believe that they will continue to be successful doing the same thing into the future.

Tell this theory to Blockbuster Video, Circuit City, and Radio Shack, to name a few. These were companies that were extremely successful but chose not to grow with the rapidly changing world. They are now just a memory to many of us. They could not sustain greatness.

Jerry Weinberg said, “No matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem”. Great organizations do not fail alone. These failures result in people that develop a sense of complacency that allows solutions, which once gave positive results, to no longer be enough for success in the future.  Each of us has the opportunity to help drive our lives, our careers, and our organizations to stay ahead of the success curve.

In my presentation, I want to share many situations within my career and experiences where I learned that I needed to grow to keep up, to stay relevant, and ultimately, succeed.

We will discuss the following:

•       You must consider the audience & context of greatness – WHO ARE YOU COMPARING WITH?
•       Being successful and achieving honors and awards is awesome – but WHAT DO YOU DO NEXT?
•       Establishing a roadmap from “Good” to “Great” and, ultimately, “The Best Version of You”
•       Understanding what you want to be “when you grow up” – ARE YOU WHERE YOU WANT TO BE?

Bio

Mike Lyles is a Director of QA and Project Management with over 25 years of IT experience in multiple organizations, including Fortune 50 companies. He has exposure in various IT leadership roles: software development, program management office, and software testing. He has led various teams within testing organizations: functional testing, test environments, software configuration management, test data management, performance testing, test automation, and service virtualization.

Mike has been successful in career development, team building, coaching, and mentoring of IT & QA professionals.  Mike has been an international keynote speaker at multiple conferences and events and is regularly published in testing publications and magazines. His first published motivational book, “The Drive-Thru Is Not Always Faster”, was released in 2019. His book site is www.TheDriveThruBook.com 

Abstract

Admitting failure is hard. Admitting failure as a manager feels impossible. Yet, that vulnerability is exactly what managers need in order to build trust and encourage learning and experimentation, which are keys to innovation, in software and in life. Jess will talk about her failures and lessons learned, as a teacher and a manager, and share key takeaways with the audience so they can fail forward, gracefully.

Bio

Dr. Jess Ingrassellino is an engineering manager at Influx Data. She is a frequent speaker at international conferences and focuses on community, collaboration, and improvisational practices for enriching professional life. Jess is also the Founder of TeachCode, where she focuses on writing curricula and teaching computer programming and software testing. In her spare time, Jess engages in creative pursuits, including playing the violin, writing poetry, and sewing.

Abstract 

Bio

Ajay Balamurugadas, goes by the handle ‘ajay184f’ in the testing community and is continuously re-inventing his testing methodology. He co-founded Weekend Testing – a worldwide movement for skilled testing authored six small books under the theme “What If” downloadable at his blog. His latest book is available at www.leanpub.com/50mistakes. His friends associate the terms – ‘Change Agent, Idea Man, Motivational’ to him. He tweets under @ajay184f and loves to have long conversations on software testing and life in general. He is currently leading the delivery at Qapitol QA – Provider of Continuous Testing Solutions to DevOps Teams.

Abstract

You learn more from failure than from success. Don’t let it stop you. Failure builds character.

Fear drives failure in most cases. There is never a capability problem but it is more of an opportunity or motivation problem. Most of the folks have forgotten the meaning of experiments & hypotheses in the work they are doing. In this talk, I will go through some of my personal stories around my engineering journey and I will explain how things can be done fearlessly with easy solutions around metrics, analyzing the data, and increasing the scope. Through the examples, you will understand how the journey of a tester has driven from a manual to automation and now to engineering.

Bio

Having a decade and a half of experience doing intelligent automation with various tools and tech stack developed products, executed large transformation programs, applied machine learning concepts in QA. Expertise in reducing cycle time for organizations with effective use of resources. Passionate about developing solutions to exciting problems in applied reliability engineering. Love to help others, solve complex problems, and passionate to share experience, failure & success stories with folks. Authored books on selenium published by Tata McGraw-Hill’s & Amazon. A father of a lovely daughter.