Our Famous 99-Second Talks

Simon is the Community Lead at Ministry of Testing and his pronouns are he/him. He has a passion for all things testing with a career in various testing and tech roles since 2003. He particularly enjoys promoting and sharing the value of exploratory testing, leadership, collaboration, creativity and community.

@A11y_Ady on Twitter (X). Passionate about accessibility, exploring and testing as part of the creation and development of software. I help teams build better software and I strongly believe in collaborative methods and using different thought techniques and people perspectives to look at things from many angles. Accessibility is about inclusion, not just disability. In my career I’ve been a Director. Test, BI and Logistics Manager. Tester, Test Engineer, QA, Site Lead Tester, Quality Engineering Architect and any other value adding role required at the time. I have also taught, coached and mentored people throughout my career. My career highlight is creating the Software Tester Apprenticeship for the Coders Guild and training people to get their first role in IT through government sponsored free training courses based on my apprenticeship. I have my own blog at The Big Test Theory.com sharing my thoughts, occasional poetry and my Periodic Table of Testing, a visual heuristic showing the breadth of the testing universe.

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.