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Discussion: Driving a Culture of Quality

14th December 2023

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Discussion: Driving a Culture of Quality image

Talk Description

During this session, we will be able to hear from three huge leaders in the influencing space. They will share their knowledge and experience of all the ways they contribute and drive a culture of quality in their workspace, in their teams or within the community.

Ben Dowen - Has had the great honour of working with a variety of different teams, and different structures over the past 11+ years. From large enterprises with central testing teams to small consultancies with only a small handful of testers, Ben had the opportunity to influence quality in different ways. Ben truly believes that building great software is a team sport, and influencing quality takes a blend of technical skill and domain knowledge, applied using a combination of advocacy and knowledge sharing.

Caleb Crandall - Has over 11 years of experience in writing and testing high-quality software for medical devices. Caleb has been fortunate to join a software team that already had a strong culture of quality, but he helps influence and maintain that culture through participation in requirement, design, and code reviews; celebrating finding bugs (every bug they find and fix before shipping is a bug that doesn't impact their customers' experience!); and being a strong advocate for "slow is smooth, smooth is fast" development and testing practices. That is, doing the things they know they need to do to reduce risk and increase confidence in the robustness of each increment of work they deliver, even under pressure.

Parveen Khan - Is a solo tester within her company. Being a solo tester meant that Parveen has always been trying to coach/mentor devs to be quality champions and mostly successfully, has been able to build a whole team quality approach. This has helped her in being able to focus on driving quality initiatives and not just be there to test the features even though she's the only tester on the team. This is also very much aligned to making use of everyone's influencing skills and leading without a title (lead title) or authority to drive changes within the team.

What you’ll learn

By the end of this talk, you'll be able to:

Learn directly from industry experts
Understand about the successes and challenges of driving a culture of quality
Discover how you can drive a culture of quality

Parveen Khan

Senior QA Consultant @ Thoughtworks

Parveen is a senior quality analyst consultant at Thoughtworks. Being a quality advocate she believes delivering high-quality products is everyone's responsibility. She loves collaborating with teams and optimizing processes, tools and methodologies to enable the creation of high-quality products. She is also an international speaker sharing her stories and experiences in testing to inspire other people around the globe. In her spare time, she plays the role of wonder woman for her two lovely kids

Caleb Crandall

Senior Software Engineer in Test

Caleb is a Software Engineer in Test and Scrum Master at Beckman Coulter Life Sciences. He earned his group's "Certified Biomek Engineer" badge of honor while still an intern (i.e. causing an epic hardware crash) and has been hooked on testing ever since. Caleb has been helping develop and test medical and research devices for over 11 years, and is now focused on improving and streamlining testing efforts at every stage of the design, development, and release process. He enjoys getting his hands dirty running hardware out in the development lab, and still keeps a pile of broken hardware "trophies" on his desk.

Ben Dowen

Senior Quality Engineer

Working professionally in Software Testing for over 11 years I've had the pleasure of working on a range of different software. From enterprise infrastructure and virtualization, web and mobile apps, and more than one back-end service. I like to think I understand how software is built and where it lives, and this helps give me confidence when exploring and identifying risks. I believe delivering software is a team sport, that involves strong collaboration between different people who bring their own skills and experience. It's this belief that leads me to focus on collaborative testing techniques, such as pairing and ensemble exploration.

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