STARWEST 2024 - Test Leadership

Wednesday, September 25

Aprajita-Mathur
Guardant Health
W2

Build Your Career and Your Worth, Not Just Your Relationship with Your Manager

Wednesday, September 25, 2024 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Change in organizational structure, especially your direct manager, can be very stressful and life altering. After all, people leave managers, not companies right? Aprajita Mathur would disagree. Change is hard for all of us and sometimes losing the person with whom we were so closely aligned and working can be hard to successfully navigate. Aprajita has been blessed to have had over 15+ managers in her career, an average burn rate of 1.5 years or less. Though this was a challenging path at the start of her career, having this vast experience has taught her what really matters in the long...

John Jenkins
Disney
W8

Testing Retrospective: Lessons from the Past

Wednesday, September 25, 2024 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

We prepare for the future by learning from the lessons of the past. During this session, you will look back at some of the craziest bugs John Jenkins has run across during his career, and see what lessons can be gleaned from them to help tackle the problems of tomorrow. Bugs come in all shapes and sizes, and can exist in processes just as easily as they can exist in code. In this session, both types will be examined, including: the too much free space bug, the V1 bug, the too much test data bug, and more. The session will also explore some of the best practices John has developed in his...

Shawn Burke
PhoenixTeam
W14

Quality Is More Than Testing—How to Build a Test Team with a Customer-Centric Mindset

Preview
Wednesday, September 25, 2024 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Testers are not part of the process; they don’t have sufficient knowledge of the client’s business to understand the big picture. This failure to understand leads to unsatisfactory outcomes that leave the client with unanswered questions. For a client to feel testing is of value, the software must work seamlessly and exceed their expectations. The solution is to shift testing left towards discovery and include testers early in the process so they have a stake in end-to-end results. Testers must understand the subject matter, ask questions, and be a valued part of the core team....