Fiona Charles
Title: Inspiring Quality: Quality Leadership
Overview: A leader sets an example and inspires others to follow and then to lead in their turn. You don’t have to be a manager to be a leader—but if you’re not also a leader, you can’t be a good manager.
- What does it take to be a leader?
- Where do exceptional quality leaders focus their energies?
- How can you get to be an exceptional quality leader?
- What does “leadership” mean in a self-managed team?
Inspiring quality means much more than getting people to follow you. It means setting an example with excellent work. It means fostering teamwork that will enhance the effectiveness of your whole project team. It also means earning credibility for quality-focused activities, so that managers and fellow team members understand their value, and the contribution of those activities to customer and stakeholder satisfaction. You can shine as a quality leader even if you are a sole tester on your project team.
In this full-day interactive workshop, we’ll examine the key focus areas for quality leaders, and work together to identify the skills and personal qualities essential for exceptional quality leadership.
You’ll have an opportunity to practice solving leadership problems, to assess your leadership aspirations and potential, and see how you can become the leader you want to be and bring benefits to all the projects you work on.
This workshop is for anyone who wants to become a quality leader or a more effective leader.
Note: No equipment is required for this workshop. Just bring yourself and a pen and notebook. If you want more information about what to expect, I recommend you read this blog post: http://quality-intelligence.blogspot.ca/2015/08/how-to-evaluate-workshop.html
Bio: Fiona Charles is an independent consultant and international keynote speaker specialising in the human side of software quality and testing. She teaches organizations to manage their software quality risk, and software practitioners practical human skills essential to thrive, excel, and lead on any kind of software team. Fiona conducts interactive workshops at conferences, online, and in-house for clients; has recorded several webinars, and published many articles in quality-related publications. She edited “The Gift of Time” (2008), a book of essays celebrating the work of Gerald M. Weinberg.
Follow her on twitter @FionaCCharles.
Hilary Weaver-Robb
Title: Zero to API Testing Hero in One Day
Overview: Web services and APIs make up a huge chunk of the code in the applications we test, but either we’re not aware of the APIs or we’re asked to focus on the user interface instead. But those APIs are where all of the business logic for the application is exposed, and can hide some pretty nasty bugs.
In this full-day workshop, we’ll learn what APIs are and then tackle an API testing project ourselves – from understanding the documentation, how the UI uses the API using DevTools in the browser, testing with Postman, and finally writing some automated checks with C#. By the end of the day, you’ll have a solid understanding of what APIs are and why we should test them, how HTTP response codes fit into our testing, how familiar UI tests translate into API tests, how to use Postman to test our APIs, how to read some common API documentation, how to use DevTools to find how the UI is using the API, prioritize and plan our automation, and create a framework with some automated checks against the API in C#. You can walk into work after this ready to champion the API testing love and add valuable tests right away!
Come prepared with a laptop that has:
- Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition (OR Visual Studio Code with dotnet 6 SDK; while the workshop is geared toward Visual Studio 2022, you can make it work with VS Code but you may need some additional extensions)
- Postman
- Chrome
- 101 knowledge of C# and OOP is helpful
Bio: Hilary Weaver-Robb is a Sr. Software Engineer in Test near Detroit. She is a mentor to her fellow testers, makes friends with developers, and helps teams level-up their quality processes, tools, and techniques. Hilary loves to help train folks in API testing and automation, using static analysis to inform our testing, and has always been passionate about improving the relationships between developers and testers, and evangelizes software testing as a rewarding, viable career.
She runs the Motor City Software Testers user group, working to build a community of quality advocates. Hilary tweets (a lot) as @g33klady, and you can find her thoughts and experiences in the testing world, at g33klady.com.
Jenna Charlton
Title: Test-Design Based Thinking For Fun and Profit
Overview: Explore the science and the art of designing test cases for unit testing, manual testing, and automated testing, getting hands-on with practical exercises designed to challenge and deepen your skills.
Jenna shares key agile, focused test design techniques, including equivalence class, boundary-value, decision table, state transition designs and tables, and hands on ensemble exploratory testing.
Leave this workshop with a newfound confidence for developing test cases and executing testing that finds important bugs earlier, and methods to apply these techniques while pairing and mobbing with your team.
Bio: Jenna is a software tester and product owner with over a decade of experience. They’ve spoken at a number of dev and test conferences and is passionate about risk-based testing, building community within agile teams, developing the next generation of testers, and A11y. When not testing, Jenna loves to go to punk rock shows and live pro wrestling events with their husband Bob, traveling, and cats. Their favorite of which are the 2 that share their home, Maka and Excalipurr.