Lecture Series

For the time being, the KWSQA is continuing to offer KWality Talks online for free via Zoom.

Register: Online at our KWality Talk Page, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email.

Location: Online

Time: The meeting starts between 11:55 am and 12:00 pm, a waiting room might be enabled if you arrive prior to this time. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Kenzie Woodbridge

Topic:

N

You have found a secret room in the castle! You gain 26 xp.

You enter a large interior space with stone walls and a high stone ceiling. Torches flicker in wall brackets. A large self-referential tapestry hanging on the north wall shows a guild workshop full of happy weavers busily weaving the very tapestry in which they are depicted. There are exits to the east, west, and south.

Linden, another player, is here. Gwyrian, another player, is here.

say Hi

You say “Hi”

Gwyrian says “Hey! Do you want to explore this area together?”

Linden attacks you with a critical hit from their sword!

You are dead!

Other people: sometimes difficult to work with and often impossible to predict. In your technical or documentation project, how can you get the right people interested and involved? How can you keep those people happily engaged until the work is done? Is there anything you can do to prevent griefing… err, “interpersonal difficulties” from causing delays? And why do some people seem to thrive in an environment with poor documentation and how can you encourage them to participate in effectively documenting everything anyway?

In this talk, I’ll explore ways to accomplish these aims, using strategies drawn from “Player Type Theory”. For 20 years, this theory has been employed by game designers to encourage stable long-term play communities in online multiplayer games. These are strategies that I have used successfully in my workplace and they can work for you too.

Bio: 
Kenzie works at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, as a Senior Systems Analyst, Web Developer, Knowledge Strategist, and Community Manager. Kenzie has a passion for communication, continuous iterative improvement, and for systemic solutions to systemic problems. Kenzie has previously spoken at PSEWeb, BCNET, Write the Docs, the International Conference on Communication & Media Studies, the Association of Internet Research Conference, Bifrost Conference for Leaders in Tech, DevOpsDays events in various locations, Craft Conf, Accento, and STC InterChange, and completed a Master’s degree in Professional Communication by writing their thesis on prosocial community within Minecraft multiplayer servers.

Kenzie is awesome and you totally want to be their friend (offer of friendship void where local laws do not permit, not guaranteed in all circumstances, skill-testing questions required).

For the time being, the KWSQA is continuing to offer KWality Talks online for free via Zoom.

Due to unforeseen circumstances the November 30th KWality Talk has been rescheduled for December 7th, we apologize for any inconvenience and hope that you can still join us!

Register: Online at our KWality Talk Page, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email.

Location: Online

Time: The meeting starts between 11:55 am and 12:00 pm, a waiting room might be enabled if you arrive prior to this time. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Ian Douglas

Topic:
Postman has been known for years as an API testing tool, but it does SOO much more. The API builder in Postman will generate a lot of tooling for your team, including documentation, mock servers, server-side and client-side code snippets, and so much more. Teams can share environments, fork and merge changes with one another, as both a web application or desktop application. This workshop will dive into many of these features, starting with the API builder, and explore tools like Swagger/OpenAPI imports, and focus mainly on mock servers using some example RESTful and GraphQL APIs to get teams started with their work.

Bio: 
I am a long-time open-source developer, educator, manager and mentor. I encourage everyone around me to share their collective knowledge, and am a strong champion of diversity in the tech industry. When I’m not working, I’m live-streaming about career advancement and interview preparation, tinkering with 3D printing or IoT projects, or telling dad jokes on Twitter.

As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our daily lives, we are making our 2022 KWality Talks available online for free.

Register: Online Using Eventbrite, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email

Location: Online

Time: The meeting starts between 11:55 am and 12:00 pm, a waiting room might be enabled if you arrive prior to this time. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Denis Carignan and Abhishek Gupta

Topic:
A brief background of PLATO will be presented in the early half of the session, and a discussion of PLATO’s accessibility testing services will take place in the second half.

PLATO is a software testing and technology services company trusted by clients around the world. In addition to providing our clients the highest quality service, PLATO was created to solve two pressing problems: high unemployment of Indigenous youth and Canada’s shortage of tech professionals. Since launching, we’ve done that and much more. To date, PLATO has trained and employed over 200 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people in meaningful technology careers, impacting over 60 communities and injecting over $10 million in salaries into the Indigenous economy. Hear from Denis Carignan, Executive VP Indigenous Impact & Innovation of PLATO, about our start, why Indigenous representation in tech is so important and where we plan to go from here.

Our years of expertise as a testing organization have allowed us to observe trends emerge and the demand for accessibility grow. In order to enhance and expand our accessibility services, PLATO built an Accessibility Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) where testers can obtain training in accessibility testing and become certified. Abhishek Gupta, who oversees PLATO’s accessibility practice, will talk about the value of our accessibility testing service and how we’ve integrated it into PLATO’s train-and-employ model.

Bio: 
Denis Carignan is a member of Pasqua First Nation in Treaty Four (Saskatchewan) and the EVP Indigenous Impact & Innovation of PLATO Testing. Since joining PLATO in 2016, Denis has become a national voice promoting Indigenous reconciliation and creating opportunities for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people to pursue successful careers in technology. In his role as President, Denis provides strategic direction on the organization’s management and growth and leadership on Indigenous issues. He is also critical in the development, maintenance, and growth of partnerships with Indigenous communities across the country. Denis has over 20 years of experience in executive management with the Government of Canada and has worked extensively with Indigenous organizations in Western and Atlantic Canada. Denis volunteers his time serving on the Board of Directors for two national charities—Imagine Canada and the Governor General’s Canadian Leadership Conference.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denis-carignan-3034a083/

Abhishek is a QA evangelist who is passionate about quality assurance and testing at all levels of the organization. He is currently the Director of Service Delivery, Ontario, and also leads Web Accessibility TCoE at PQA. Abhishek is PMP and has played key roles throughout his career in positions like Service Center Manager, Delivery Manager, QA Portfolio Manager, and led Managed Services Testing Teams spread across the globe. Abhishek loves to train and coach teams in software testing and its principles.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhishek-gupta-pmp/

As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our daily lives, we are making our 2022 KWality Talks available online for free.

Register: Online Using Eventbrite, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email

Location: Online

Time: The meeting starts between 11:55 am and 12:00 pm, a waiting room might be enabled if you arrive prior to this time. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Ian Howlett

Topic:
Company’s certainly love the idea of Shifting Left and folks in the Testing community love it, too. Getting it in place is another story altogether. When Testing teams traditionally come from a space at or near the end of the Software Development Lifecycle, how do you push those cultural changes left? How do you influence leaders in organizations to adopt potentially new or modified processes to build a shared ownership of quality?

I want to go over my experience in start-ups, consultancies and enterprise organizations at how you Lead From Quality. Techniques that have worked, that haven’t and ways to try and speak the language of Sales, Product and Engineering to evangelize good quality-focused initiatives.

Bio: 
I have been in the tech industry for more than 15 years. I worked for the first ten years of my career in various roles at CIBC starting as a co-op developer and ending off as a Manager in the Capital Markets Technology group. I went on to manage Testing and Engineering teams in the start-up community in Kitchener and now find myself running the Test Engineering practice at Innosphere where we provide consultancy services for organizations across North America.

As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our daily lives, we are making our 2022 KWality Talks available online for free.

Register: Online Using Eventbrite, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email

Location: Online

Time: Stream will start at approximately 11:55 am. Meeting starts at 12:00 pm. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Neil Price-Jones

Topic:
Many people ask why they would bother looking at a model for testing. Why add the expense and effort to implement a model when the current process works and all the testing is proceeding well (save for those few nasty bugs that made it out to production and cost us several customers and a lot of good will).

Join us for a brief overview of the TMMi model; three reasons why you might want to consider a model with associated ROI; and a way of implementing the identified improvements. We will consider the process used to evaluate one organisation and the results obtained from that evaluation and what they are doing now.

Bio: 
Neil Price-Jones has 35 years-experience in Software Quality Assurance in Financial, Utilities, Health Care, Retail, and Software Development including test automation and test management. Most recently he has supplied Maturity Assessments to Health Care, Quality Assurance Management to High Risk Utilities projects, and consulting on the implementation of Quality Assurance to companies looking to improve their Process Maturity.

In 1993, Neil founded NVP Software Testing to provide Quality Assurance Assessments, Coaching, Consulting, Management, and Training. He has made presentations to many software quality organizations including the ASQ, ISACA, KWSQA, MoT, PMAC, PMI, SWOSQG, and TASSQ and at Software Conferences in Canada and the United States (QUEST, TesTrek, & StarCanada).

As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our daily lives, we are making our 2022 KWality Talks available online for free.

Register: Online Using Eventbrite, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email

Location: Online

Time: Stream will start at approximately 11:55 am. Meeting starts at 12:00 pm. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Katie Fox

Topic:
Unit tests are the foundation of the test pyramid but are commonly seen as a developer’s obligation and not as a tester’s secret weapon for risk-based testing. During recent interviews with Quality Engineer candidates, I heard a recurring theme that unit tests are “tests developers write,” and it had me questioning my own contrary opinion. I questioned how I had arrived at those thoughts, and how I would encourage others to view them differently: as simple, powerful tests that increase in value with more visibility and more attention to detail during their creation.  

Well-written unit tests provide a way to concisely understand the changes for a story without reading every line of source code. Applying risk-based principles and factoring in the areas of change indicated by unit tests could allow either for a reduction in testing scope, or it could reveal new areas that were not initially considered. It can also inform where test scenarios have already been partially or fully automated and thereby prevent duplicated effort and test suite bloat. If the “whole team owns quality,” and “everyone contributes to automation,” then developers and test engineers should be familiar with all levels of automated tests that ensure such quality. As part of a team’s effort to shift-left, everyone needs to include focusing on creating and improving automation in areas that will gain the most benefit.  

This paper will discuss the benefits of shift-left testing via tester-developer collaboration around unit tests and show its successful applications in practice within unique team structures. It will provide frameworks to help developers to write readable, atomic unit tests and testers to decide which tests to automate at each level. Additionally, this framework provides less-technical testers with conversation starters to conduct code and test inspection verbally.

Bio: 
Katie Fox is a senior software test engineer at e-Builder.  

She spent her post-college years learning and growing within the field of test at Ultimate Software (now Ultimate Kronos Group) and has been navigating remote work since 2016. She graduated from the University of Central Florida with a B.S. in Computer Science and no idea that her future career existed. Fast-forward to now, she loves balancing strong domain knowledge of the user experience with a thorough understanding of the technical implementation to determine how to layer exploratory and automated testing. She takes joy in catalyzing collaborative solutions to persistent team-wide problems… if two or more people have complained about something, it is time to fix it.  

When not working, she likes to spend time outside (on coffee runs+walks, yardwork, puppy sniffs), snuggle with her cat and dog, and cultivate plants both indoors and outdoors.

As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our daily lives, we are making our 2022 KWality Talks available online for free.

Register: Online Using Eventbrite, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email

Location: Online

Time: Stream will start at approximately 11:55 am. Meeting starts at 12:00 pm. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Josh Assad

Topic:
One of the biggest questions in anyone’s career is how it will progress.  There are generally two natural courses most professions will grow into; Technical mastery or people management (sometimes both, along a spectrum, but that is a topic for another day).  For testers, the path to people management is a little less clear than it was in the pre-Agile days of testing departments and QA Managers.  However there is still a very strong case for growing testers into Engineering Managers, Directors and beyond.

In this talk I will share my journey from Tester to Engineering Manager, and highlight the skills you use as a tester today that managers leverage every day too.  If you’ve ever wondered if people management was a destination on your career journey, this talk is for you!

Bio: 
Josh Assad has been working in the software industry for over 20 years across many domains such as physical and cyber security, mobile technology, e-learning, and dev-ops/infrastructure.  A tester first, Josh has always been passionate about quality, which has extended from products to processes & people.  He has naturally taken to people-leadership roles where he strives to create cultures of innovation, safety and trust to empower those around him to do their best work.

As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our daily lives, we are making our 2022 KWality Talks available online for free.

Register: Online Using Eventbrite, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email

Location: Online

Time: Stream will start at approximately 11:55 am. Meeting starts at 12:00 pm. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Laveena Ramchandani

Topic:
How often have you heard that ‘Yes this is important, but we don’t have the capacity right now’ or ‘sure let’s put it in the backlog’?
This is something we should not brush off or take lightly. Accessibility testing is vital especially when your product is a user facing application.
We need to be socially aware as a team and build quality towards our product with making it more accessible.

At least 1 in 5 people in the UK have a long term illness, impairment or disability. Many more have a temporary disability. A recent study found that 4 in 10 local council homepages failed basic tests for accessibility.

This is quite vital and the sooner we as testers can advocate this into our teams, we make our product more accessible, reduce the risk of bad product reviews, reputation and also be more socially aware. Let’s shift left and make accessibility testing built-in our teams. 

Takeaways
1. Understand why accessibility testing is important? 
2. How I adapted accessibility mindset? 
3. How to coach team and bring accessibility into your teams? 
4. Demonstrate various tools available to perform accessibility testing

Bio: 
I am an experienced Testing Consultant with a comprehensive understanding of tools available for software testing and analysis. I am an energetic, technical-minded professional seeking a position as a Product Experience Analyst. I would really like testers out there to get involved with data science testing as there is a lot of opportunity and a great area to bring testing in. My aim is to provide valuable insights that have high technical aptitude, and unyielding commitment to work. Being able to inspire more individuals out there in the world be a great achievement.

As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our daily lives, we are making our 2021 KWality Talks available online for free.

Register: Online Using Eventbrite, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email

Location: Online

Time: Stream will start at approximately 11:55 am. Meeting starts at 12:00 pm. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Bailey Hanna

Topic:
“So, what’s your testing process like at *insert company name here*?”. We’ve all been asked this question. It comes up all the time when you tell someone that you work in testing and who you work for. People want to know what your cookie cutter process is for testing at your company; either out of genuine curiosity, a search to find a fit for their skills or to find issues in it that they think you could solve by changing “just one thing”.

What happens when the answer is “we don’t have one.”? In the tech industry things are changing every single day, and every individual has their own skills and experiences that they bring to the table, so why would we have one specific process for our entire organization?

In this talk, we will discuss what it looks like to have a constantly evolving test process within a company, and to have multiple teams within a development org working with different processes and workflows. We will discuss how we all stay on the same track, how we discuss our successes (and our failures), and how we use individual and team strengths to have an organic, and changing process that still keeps us all moving forward and working together.

Bailey Hanna: 
Bailey Hanna is a passionate and driven quality advocate with experience in a variety of testing roles. She enjoys using her background in software engineering and knowledge of risk assessment, risk mitigation and exploratory testing skills to prepare and execute appropriate testing strategies for new and existing projects within multiple teams. She also speaks at quality and development conferences about quality/testing as well as team communication and collaboration. When she’s not thinking about all things quality related, she likes to spend her time outside, reading books, or really doing anything away from her laptop!

As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our daily lives, we are making our 2021 KWality Talks available online for free.

Register: Online Using Eventbrite, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email

Location: Online

Time: Stream will start at approximately 11:55 am. Meeting starts at 12:00 pm. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Gerie Owen and Peter Varhol

Topic:
The nature of technical skills is undergoing a radical change. Testers need to be aware of a dramatic shift to being a generalist, and be prepared to redefine their career.

The last ten years have seen a great number of changes in the testing profession, such as widespread automation, agile, DevOps, and test-driven development. And yet we are only in the early stages of a profound transformation in testing skills and the roles testers will play in delivering quality software.

Today many testers are asking what knowledge and skills are needed to have a successful career in an era where testing means many different things. While no one has a crystal ball into the future, it is possible to look at current trends and make educated analyses of what the future of testing and test activities may look like.

This presentation describes groundbreaking research on the advantages and limitations of flexibility in problem-solving, and how that relates to how individual employees may be asked to work in the future. It focuses on how these changes in worker expectations will affect testers, from skills needed to attitudes and outlooks. Some may even reject the title of tester.

Takeaways:

1. Attendees will understand the changes affecting the testing profession today and in the future.
2. How changes to testing are impacting how we do our jobs.
3. How testers can prepare for new ways of thinking about their work.

Gerie Owen: 
Hi, I’m Gerie Owen. I’ve been a software testing manager in various domains including insurance, financial services, energy and transportation.

I’m Certified Scrum Master, Conference Presenter and Author on technology and testing topics. She enjoys analyzing and improving test processes and mentoring new QA Leads as well as bringing a cohesive team approach to testing.

I’m excited about my role as QA Architect at Medullan because I bring my passion for and experience in quality assurance, quality engineering and testing along with my background in health education to make a difference in the people’s lives. Quality is critical because heath matters.

Peter Varhol:
Peter Varhol is a well-known writer and speaker on software and technology topics, having authored dozens of articles and spoken at a number of industry conferences and webcasts. He has advanced degrees in computer science, applied mathematics, and psychology. Currently he is technical evangelist for Gurucul, specializing in AI, Big Data, and analytics. His past roles include technology journalist, software product manager, software developer, and university professor.