STARWEST 2017 - Career & Personal Development

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...

To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he addresses common metrics—measures of product...

With Git and GitHub, testers today have unprecedented visibility into both development and DevOps code. GitHub provides powerful online collaboration, code review, code management, and version control services. GitHub's domination of social coding makes it the professionals’ new business card, indicating their creativity, popularity, capability, and tenacity. Today’s testers need to learn about and use Git and GitHub. In this hands-on tutorial Wilson Mar presents material available nowhere else and a unique explanation of tools, repositories, and GUI programs used by professional...

Today, many agile organizations are making a terrible error. They are assuming there is no place for test management and leadership in agile, self-directed team contexts. Mary Thorn and Bob Galen beg to differ with this view and believe a strong need exists for testing leadership in agile organizations—just not the way we’ve typically approached it. Join Mary and Bob as they explore what excellent test team leadership looks like in agile contexts. Explore the aspects of self-directed teams and the implications to your previous leadership styles. Look under the covers of Scrum and see where...

Many organizations today are adopting DevOps to accelerate software delivery. However, once they have invested significant time and money optimizing most parts of the software delivery process, testing often holds them back from achieving the desired results. Why? Because software testing is still dominated by yesterday’s tools and processes—which don’t meet the needs of today’s accelerated development processes. How can you ensure that you and your team help the organization achieve its objectives? Wayne Ariola says that the key is continuous testing—and Wayne doesn’t just mean test...

Are you being asked to shorten your testing timelines? Do you feel pressured to increase your test automation coverage but don’t have the time, staff, or budget? How do you as a leader upgrade your existing teams’ programming skills and technical abilities without bringing in external resources—and still meet your daily release deliverables? Join Jennifer Scandariato as she shares her journey in transforming the QA department at iCIMS into a Test Engineering Center of Excellence, where manual testers are now automation engineers who apply appropriate automation technologies to...

Stories help us learn. They can be fun or scary, exciting or relaxing. People worldwide tell and listen to stories, and we access them through books, film, TV, and IT. But the direct experience of face-to-face storytelling is still a powerful experience. When Isabel Evans was young, there was a program on the radio called Listen with Mother. For fifteen minutes, mothers and children across the country would sit and listen to a story. Join Isabel and become your inner child. Bring your testing parent and listen to her stories. In fifteen-minute sections, Isabel recounts stories drawn from...

When people hear about my past jobs, my career, and the many places I “work” (at foreign conferences and even on ski lifts), I often get the question “How do I get your job?” However, when people hear some of the details of my career, their reaction is “Gee, that’s a lot of work!” Well, yes, but that does not mean that hard work is not fun. Jon Hagar presents a career map that contains his secrets to getting, keeping, and growing in the fun and exciting career of software testing. These include getting started with learning, seeking challenges, sustaining passion, finding...

The key to creating high-performing teams is psychological safety—the ability to be vulnerable in front of others even when they hold diverse viewpoints, and the opportunity to take risks and trust that everything will be OK. However, creating this safety is easier said than done. Maaret Pyhäjärvi shares her story of working with software development and test teams to enable them to be awesome. She explains how to reinforce the positive while enabling great software product development by empowering others in your team. Maaret explores how to be brave when others are not, and how to care...

When Picture This Clothing launched in August of 2016 and instantly went viral, the media made it sound like Jaimee was a "simple mom" who stumbled upon a great idea and struck gold. What they didn't share is the teamwork, the trials-and-error, and the years of work that happened before this viral success. While her current day-to-day is quite literally surrounded with imagination, unicorns, and rainbows, Jaimee delves into the struggle of self-worth, re-designing her life, and how her compass of intention positioned everything that has unfolded as she shares the story of how Picture This...

Let's face it. As leaders, we often struggle to create and nurture the sort of communication and conversation that our organizations and teams need. For many of us it's not a comfort zone or a strength. And frankly, these conversations are often uncomfortable and take a great deal of energy. That being said, today's leaders need to face this shortcoming and become much more skilled and comfortable initiating and executing the sorts of conversations that will engage their teams and deliver value for their customers. In this session Bob Galen will explore the central aspects of having...

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...

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 2016 and going forward.