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Personal Improvement

Tutorials

ME Leading Change―Even If You’re Not in Charge
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Mon, 09/30/2013 - 8:30am

Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization and it doesn’t get the support that you thought it would. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. Or, you have a great idea but can’t get the resources required for successful implementation. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit of techniques to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work within your organization.

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TC Critical Thinking for Software Testers
James Bach, Satisfice, Inc.
Tue, 10/01/2013 - 8:30am

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.

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TE Discovering New Test Ideas: Getting that Burst of Creativity NEW
Karen N. Johnson, Software Test Management, Inc.
Tue, 10/01/2013 - 8:30am

Feel your testing’s stuck in a rut? Looking for new ways to discover test ideas? Wondering if your testers have constructive methods to discover different approaches for testing? In this interactive session, Karen Johnson explains how to use heuristics to find new ideas. After a brief discussion, Karen has you apply and practice with a variety of heuristics. Need to step back and consider some of your testing challenges from a fresh perspective?

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TJ Improve Your Social and In-Person Networking Skills NEW
Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
Tue, 10/01/2013 - 8:30am

You don’t have to be a social butterfly to succeed with social networking. As a manager, tester, or QA professional, you need to differentiate yourself from the pretenders. If you are a “doer,” it’s time to start building your reputation at work and extending your reach on social networking sites, discussion forums, through online participation and at conferences like STAR. Whether you are searching for a new job, recruiting a candidate, or looking for new ways to solve problems, you need to know how to network.

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TM Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities NEW
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Tue, 10/01/2013 - 1:00pm

Innovation is a word tossed around frequently in organizations today. The standard cliché is “Do more with less.” People and teams want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, prioritize, implement, and track their innovation efforts. Jennifer Bonine shares the "Innovation Types" model to give you new tools to evolve and expand your innovation capabilities. Find out if your innovation ideas and efforts match your team and company goals. Learn how to classify your innovation and improvement efforts as core (to the business) or context (essential but non-revenue generating).

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TN Collaboration Techniques: Forgotten Wisdom and New Approaches SOLD OUT NEW
Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
Dorothy Graham, Software Test Consultant
Tue, 10/01/2013 - 1:00pm

In our increasingly agile world, the new buzzword is collaboration—so easy to preach but difficult to do well. Testers are challenged to work directly and productively with customers, programmers, business analysts, writers, trainers, and pretty much everyone in the business value chain. Testers and managers have many touch points of collaboration: grooming stories with customers, sprint planning with team members, reviewing user interaction with customers, troubleshooting bugs with developers, whiteboarding with peers, and buddy checking.

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Keynotes

K1 What Executives Value in Testing
Michael Kelly, DeveloperTown
Jeanette Thebeau, Ex2 Partners
Wed, 10/02/2013 - 8:30am

Professional testers and test managers are feeling the pressures of low-cost competition and tools that claim to replace them through automation. So, how can test teams add more value to their projects and organization? In a recent survey of executives and testers, Mike Kelly and Jeanette Thebeau found major disconnects between what executives and testers believe are most important to the business. They explore new insights into the risks and concerns executives perceive and what you should do differently.

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Concurrent Sessions

T11 It’s All Fun and Games: Using Play to Improve Tester Creativity
Christin Wiedemann, Professional Quality Assurance, Ltd.
Thu, 10/03/2013 - 11:15am

The number of software test tools keeps expanding, and individual tools are continuously becoming more advanced. However, there is no doubt that a tester’s most important—yet often neglected and underused—tool is the mind. As testers, we need to employ our intelligence, imagination, and creativity to gain information about the system under test. Humans are biologically designed to learn through play, and even as adults we can exploit this and harness the power of play to encourage and drive our creativity.

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