STAREAST 2019 Women Who Test Session - Failing and Recovering | TechWell

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Friday, May 3, 2019 - 8:30am to 9:45am

Failing and Recovering

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Do you ever feel you have lost confidence in your own abilities? Why does this happen? Isabel Evans spends a lot of time painting. Someone once commented, “Why are you doing this, when you are not very good at it?” And gradually she stopped drawing and painting, after being intimidated by a conventional vision of what good art should look like. At the same time, she experienced a parallel loss of confidence in her professional abilities. Attempting creative pursuits like drawing and painting is essential to cognitive, emotional, creative abilities and she began to understand the correlation between her creative activities and her confidence. Making errors, being wrong, failing – that is a generous gift we receive when we practice outside our skill level. By staying in a comfort zone and repeating successes, we stagnate. As Isabel started to create again she thought “I don’t feel good at it, I do feel good doing it” The difference was that she was learning, having ideas and the act of re-engaging with failure, together with the comradeship of friends and colleagues, including at Women Who Test, Isabel has regained her confidence in her professional abilities, and been able to reboot her career and joy. Join Isabel to share a journey from self-perceived failure, to recovery and renewed learning.

Isabel Evans
Independent Consultant

Independent quality and testing consultant Isabel Evans has more than thirty years of IT experience in the financial, communications, and software sectors. Her work focuses on quality management, software testing, and user experience (UX). Isabel authored Achieving Software Quality through Teamwork and chapters in Agile Testing: How to Succeed in an eXtreme Testing Environment, The Testing Practitioner, and Foundations of Software Testing. A popular speaker and storyteller at software conferences worldwide, Isabel is a fellow of the British Computer Society and a twenty-year member of software industry improvement working groups, and she received the 2017 EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award. Connect with Isabel on LinkedIn, Twitter, or her website.