My session is based on my experiences as a tester and from managing and working with testers. It's a case study, but I want to get participants involved so that they feel they can ask questions and get as much from the session as possible.
I’ll start by getting a show of hands for different job titles (eg devs in the room, testers in the room etc). I’ll then ask a couple of people to share with me why they’ve come along - is there anything specific they or their team struggle with in terms of integrating testers, or helping testers (and others) understand why they are valuable? I’ll write these on a flipchart and cross them off as I cover them throughout my case study.
In the case study, I will cover these 3 areas:
1. Why testers feel undervalued, including:
I won’t dwell on this section, as it’s going over old ground and I think it's more important to focus on how to fix it - but the purpose is to set the scene and help those not in a testing role understand their point of view.
2. Why testers are important - this will cover the value and skills testers add to the team that other members don’t, including:
I’ll use some examples in this section of when I’ve seen testers being instrumental in a project's success, and examples of when projects without a tester have failed.
3. How to help testers (and others) see why they are important - this will cover:
I’ll also talk about some coaching and mentoring techniques I’ve used to help testers take pride in their jobs and stand up to developers or others who don’t understand their value.
If any of the original points raised by the audience have not been covered in these 3 sections I will then aim to tackle them at the end, before taking any questions.
The aim is for people to walk out of my session with a better understanding of why some testers don’t feel valued and how to help all the team work better together.
Liz started out as a QA engineer at Holiday Extras in 2010. After a couple of years learning her trade she began to have a bigger impact, first introducing the team to automated testing and then revamping the team to be software testers, pushing for quality to be considered at all stages of the development process.
She has 3+ years experience in management, focusing mostly on developing high performance and supporting the changing needs of a growing team. Oh, and she also dabbled at being a scrum master for around a year!
Even now that her role (leading a web team of 70+ people) is further away from day to day testing, she can't stop herself getting involved in the testing team and finding out about the latest trends and ideas.
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