Agile testing days keynote and workshop

This November I’ll be in Potsdam, Germany to give a keynote and a workshop for Agile Testing Days. I’ve never been to Agile Testing Days before but I’ve heard it’s awesome so I’m really excited. Last year they had about 400 attendees of which a quarter were speakers! The speaker lineup this year looks just as huge and just as great. I am really looking forward to meeting some of these people who I have only ever spoken to online, as well as catch up with some amazing testers who I have not seen in person in quite a while now.

Agile Testing Days is also setting a great example for other conferences by having a healthy percentage of female speakers – over half the keynoters are women this year! So don’t listen to anyone who says it’s impossible to do.

I will be giving a keynote called Transparency: A holistic approach to software quality. This is a concept I’ve been mulling over for about 5 years now and I’ve been using this model in my training work to teach testers how to successfully analyze and improve software projects. I have found that using this model gives testers a new perspective on their work and opens up many new directions for their work.

The workshop I am running is called Build a super testing team and it’s designed for managers and team leads. A common problem I find is that nobody outside of a testing team understands the value of the testing team. This makes it difficult to negotiate resources, time and headcount for your team. Testers often find themselves constantly justifying their own roles, and being held accountable to dangerous metrics. In the past I have taken undervalued teams and built them a solid reputation for results that other managers understood and respected. In this workshop I will teach you how to do the same in your own workplace.

As this involves many people skills, the practical exercises I have devised will be done in the form of a fun Dungeons & Dragons game – no prior experience necessary. :)

Register now for my one-day tutorial and my Tuesday keynote.