Personal Improvement

Tutorials

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

Mon, 09/28/2015 - 8:30am

Have you ever needed a way to measure your leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies, explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can improve competencies that are not in your core set of strengths, and describes techniques for leveraging and building on your strengths. These tools can help you become a more effective and valued leader in your organization. Exercises help you gain an understanding of yourself and strive for balanced leadership through recognition of both your strengths and your “development opportunities.”

MJ Applying Emotional Intelligence to Testing

Julie Gardiner, Hitachi Consulting

Mon, 09/28/2015 - 8:30am

As test managers and test professionals, we're constantly dealing with fragile egos, highly charged situations, and pressured people playing a high-stakes game under conditions of massive uncertainty. We're often the bearers of bad news and are sometimes perceived as critics, activating people's primal fear of being judged. The concept of emotional intelligence (EI), popularized by Harvard psychologist and science writer Daniel Goleman, has much to offer test managers and testers. Key EI skills include self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Julie Gardiner discusses how EI can be useful in dealing with anger management, controlling negative thoughts, processing constructive criticism, and dealing with conflict—all within the context of the testing profession. Explore the concept of EI, assess your own levels of EI, and look at ways EI can help. This lively session is grounded in real-life examples, giving you concrete ideas to take back to work.

MM Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

Mon, 09/28/2015 - 1:00pm

Innovation is a word frequently tossed around in organizations today. The standard clichés are do more with less and be creative. Companies want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, implement, prioritize, and track their innovation efforts. Using the Innovation to Types model, Jennifer Bonine will help you transform your thinking regarding innovation and understand if your team and company goals match their innovation efforts. Learn how to classify your activities as “core” (to the business) or “context” (essential, but non-revenue generating). Once you understand how your innovation activities are related to revenue generating activities, you can better decide how much of your effort should be spent on core or context activities. Take away tools including an Innovation to Types model for classifying innovation, a Core and Context model for classifying your activities, and a way to map your innovation initiatives to different contexts.

MP Get Your Message Across: Communication Skills for Testers

Julie Gardiner, Hitachi Consulting

Mon, 09/28/2015 - 1:00pm

Communication is at the heart of our profession. If we can’t convey our concerns in ways that connect with key members of the project team, our contribution is likely to be ignored—no matter how advanced our testing capabilities are. Because we act in an advisory capacity rather than being in command, our power to exert influence is almost entirely based on our communication skills. Join Julie Gardiner as she draws on techniques from psychology and marketing to help you get your message across. With people suffering information overload and deluged with emails, it is more important than ever to craft succinct and effective messages, using a range of communication modalities. Key themes include: non-verbal communication, presentation skills, persuasive writing, influencing skills, graphic communication, and communicating in teams and meetings. Attendees will use a range of hands-on exercises to practice the concepts being discussed.

Concurrent Sessions

W2 The Testopsy: Dissect Your Testing

James Bach, Satisfice, Inc.

Jon Bach, eBay, Inc.

Wed, 09/30/2015 - 11:30am

To improve as a skilled tester, you don't necessarily have to attend a class or read a book. James and Jon Bach show how you can grow by recording and then dissecting as few as five minutes of your test process. Using a Testopsy, you build your skills of observation, narration, and test framing. And if you do it with a colleague or as a group, it stimulates discussion on test design and test strategy. James and Jon demonstrate a live Testopsy to underscore these points and give you specific guidelines for conducting your own. Testing is a performance—not an artifact. Much like a medical examiner narrates his autopsies into a tape recorder, you can look very carefully at what you actually do and identify your own heuristics. By putting that process into descriptive, evocative words, you can discover surprising depths in each act of testing you perform.

T17 The Secret Life of Testers: Where Your Time Really Goes

Michael Bolton, DevelopSense

James Bach, Satisfice, Inc.

Thu, 10/01/2015 - 1:30pm

Testing is on the schedule. Your title is Tester. It is time to test. The team is waiting for you. Everybody thinks you spend your time testing. So, why does it seem that you spend so little time actually testing? Michael Bolton and James Bach will show you. They have developed a training and research tool to visually animate the progress of testing. Through the use of testopsies and session-based test management data, Michael and James have collected patterns of how context-driven testers use their time—from the micro to the macro level.