STAREAST 2016 - Personal Improvement
Sunday, May 1
Software Tester Certification—Foundation Level (3–Day)
Monday, May 2
Get Your Message Across: Communication Skills for Testers
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...
Enhance Your Testing Workbox with New Approaches, Methods, and Ideas
What do you do when you are not testing? Whatever it is, you probably have a place where you work on your interests, some tools and equipment, and especially some things you always have with you. Perhaps you have a room or shed or tool rack with your favorite and your most used equipment easily at hand in a workbox. Wouldn’t it be great to have your own workbox for testing? Well, you already do! Everyone’s “mental tool set” is different, but we all need versatile,...
Applying Emotional Intelligence in Testing
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...
Tuesday, May 3
Critical Thinking for Software Testers
Critical thinking is the kind of thinking that specifically looks for problems and mistakes. Regular people don't do a lot of it. However, if you want to be a great tester, you need to be a great critical thinker. Critically thinking testers save projects from dangerous assumptions and ultimately from disasters. The good news is that critical thinking is not just innate intelligence or a talent—it's a learnable and improvable skill you can master. Michael Bolton shares the specific techniques and heuristics of critical thinking and presents realistic testing puzzles that help you practice...
What’s Your Leadership IQ?
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...
Influence Diagrams: A New Way to Understand Testing
Influence diagrams provide a simple-to-create and easy-to-understand approach to address the complexities of real-life problems. For instance, as testers we may want to find more bugs, but does this have an unintended consequence for the developers? Developers now have more defects to debug, which affects their capacity to deliver new functionality. Influence diagrams provide a means of understanding and managing the complexities of key interactions among testers, developers, and business stakeholders. In the past few years, Isabel Evans has used influence diagrams as a practical tool to...
Thursday, May 5
Testing Lessons from the Land of Make Believe
Rob Sabourin has discovered testing lessons in Sesame Street, the Simpsons, the Looney Tunes gang, the Great Detectives, Dr. Seuss, and many other unlikely places, but this year he journeys to the Land of Make Believe. Rob's grandchildren Jane and Suzy draw him into the Land of Make Believe. Every visit is a new adventure. By leaving reality for the realm of play, Rob has discovered many simple truths and clever strategies for solving stubborn technical, management,...
Evolve or Die: What Testers Need to Do to Survive and Thrive
With the advent of new technologies, agile methodologies, innovative tools, and a global workforce, the tester’s role is rapidly changing. Those who can adapt to the changing environment get the best jobs and assignments, and others get left behind. As the discipline of testing evolves, test professionals have to make decisions that will determine their success and job satisfaction. Is it better to specialize or be a generalist? Are you a better fit for a small start-up or...
Friday, May 6
Creative Leadership for Creative Teams
As developers and testers, we're uniquely creative, we're inspiration driven, we obsess over every detail, and we can rarely turn it off. We are creatives, and we are different. We think differently, we perform differently—and we need to lead differently. Join Martin Ringlein for a rant, a rave, and a reality check on how to build and lead creative teams. Learn how to manage collaboration and fuel inspiration. Leave the Leadership Summit with not just data points and facts and figures about leadership, but how changing our perspective of the world around us results in more effective ways...
Design Your Life
After more than 15 years of pouring her soul and passion into making empathetic and engaging products and product teams for some of the world’s most recognized brands, and absolutely loving her work, Jaimee hit a rock-bottom career burnout. Something she never expected would happen. In finding her way back, she began to explore what might happen if she put that same dedication she had poured into the products she made into her own life as if her life were the product she was designing and she learned some fantastic, useful skills along the way that made her life, her work and how she felt...
When You're the Lone (Female) Voice of Reason
With software engineering still dominated by men, it is not uncommon for women to find themselves alone on a team of men. Those who are test-focused can find themselves in the awkward position of not only being the sole woman in the ship room, but with the tough job of telling her peers they are not ready to go to production. Melissa Benua has spent many years as the lone female voice speaking up for code quality at companies both big and small. Learn from her experiences on how to be heard and taken seriously, with tips on how to be “the woman” without making the job about being female,...
Leading through Change
The ability to change to meet the evolving business environments is critical to the success of any organization. Leading an organization through change is one of the greatest challenges leaders face. In this interactive presentation, Cynthia Gilmer discusses some of the most critical aspects of corporate change and a leader’s role in realizing a successful transformation. Take home valuable lessons on how to be a leader and manage in a crisis or during changing circumstances.
The Power of Collective Experience
Bring your biggest challenges to this session and tap the wisdom of others. In this immersive session, you will tackle some of the most widely mentioned challenges brought to light from the group. Whether it’s a software testing conundrum, a project setback, a management blocker, a group or team dysfunction or an interpersonal hurdle, all of these can slow our progress and reduce our effectiveness. And when we hunt for options, we all have blind spots and biases that prevent us from thinking out of the box and finding new and different solutions. Typically the best ideas come from...
It Was Never A Dress: How agile methodology inspired a project management software company to start a BIG conversation about women in technology and beyond!
In an effort to break down barriers and shift perceptions of women in technology—and all spaces—Axosoft used their tech superhero powers of collaboration, cross-functionality, and agility to offer up a radically reimagined women’s bathroom symbol. This new symbol has started an international conversation that is picking up STEAM! Since the campaign launched in 2015, it has generated over 18 million impressions, received attention from every major media outlet, and is funding a scholarship at Arizona State University for a need-based student entering a STEAM (science, technology,...
Panel–Career Superpowers
Let’s discuss and define the most important career superpowers for women. Hear what industry professionals, leaders, and idea disruptors think the important career superpowers are for women in 2015 and going forward.
Panel: Tania Katan, the Curator of Code at AxoSoft and Melissa Benua, Senior Backend Software Engineer at PlayFab, Inc.