Elegant Test Weapons for a More Civilized Age
Software Engineering as a discipline is always evolving. The technologies and tools that were in vogue yesterday are passé today and gone altogether tomorrow. Despite this high churn, there are a number of skills that software testers, in particular, possess that are eternally useful. They cut across time and tools and even job titles. Melissa will help software testers look past technologies and titles to explore the skills that they may already possess that are in high demand. She will explain some of the hottest job titles and technologies in the market today, and go in-depth into what skills many software testers already hold that uniquely qualify them for these positions. In the most cutting-edge software companies – from startups to megacorps – traditional software testing functions have been encompassed in roles that might not be immediately obvious. From continuous integration to test automation to devops and beyond - discover what skills are you holding that can unlock the next step in your career? Tools are ephemeral, but your skills are timeless.
Melissa Benua has worked in nearly every software development role—dev, test, DevOps, and program management—at companies big and small. She's created and run high-availability, high-quality services on products such as mParticle, PlayFab, Bing, Cortana, and Xbox One. Melissa discovered her love of massively-scaled systems while growing the Bing backend, where she honed the art of keeping highly-available complex systems up while undergoing massive code churn. Melissa isn’t afraid to mix traditional approaches with bold new ideas to make her products better, faster, and more reliable. She’s passionate not only about maximizing efficiency both in her product code and in her developer tools but also about sharing best practices among colleagues and the tech world at large.