Product Manager

Pete Walen is not going to tell you how to be a good test manager. Instead, Pete shares ideas on becoming a true leader. While some managers certainly are leaders, testers of all varieties and experience levels can become leaders. Developing technical leadership skills, regardless of job title, involves overcoming our own uncertainties, self-doubts, and perceptions. Learning to foster relationships while perfecting our craft is a challenge for everyone, particularly when others look to us to be an expert—even when we don’t feel like one.

At Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Technology, we provide the applications and infrastructure our online guests use to plan, book, explore, and enjoy their stay at our parks and resorts. With millions of page views per day and a multi-billion dollar ecommerce booking engine, we face a unique set of challenges. Join Les Honniball for insights into how they work with Product Owners and development teams to design tests, both manual and automated for these challenges.

The cloud is all about redundancy and fault tolerance. Since no single component can guarantee 100 percent uptime, we have to design architectures where individual components can fail without affecting the availability of the entire system. But just designing a fault tolerant architecture is not enough. We have to constantly test our ability to actually survive these “once in a blue moon” failures. And the best way is to test in an environment that matches production as closely as possible or, ideally, actually in production.