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Friday, September 27, 2024 - 10:30am to 12:00pm

The Power of Collective Experience

Bring your biggest challenges to this session and tap the wisdom of others. In this immersive session, you will tackle some of the most widely mentioned challenges brought to light from the group. Whether it’s a software testing conundrum, a project setback, a management blocker, a group or team dysfunction or an interpersonal hurdle, all of these can slow our progress and reduce our effectiveness. And when we hunt for options, we all have blind spots and biases that prevent us from thinking out of the box and finding new and different solutions. Typically the best ideas come from collaborating with others—so let's take your challenges out for a spin! We will engage in small group brainstorming sessions to generate ideas and approaches for managing, mitigating or solving problems. But brainstorming isn't enough. Each group will dig in and evaluate their ideas by thinking about implementing them, considering possible blockers and suggesting ways to handle them. Every participant should leave with at least one idea or an entire action plan for targeting a significant challenge they are facing today. Bring your challenges, ideas, experiences, positive energy, an open mind, and be prepared to work!

Melissa Benua
mParticle

Melissa Benua has worked in nearly every software development role—dev, test, DevOps, and program management—at companies big and small and somewhere in-between. She's created and run high availability, high-quality services for PlayFab, Bing, Cortana, and Xbox One, and now for mParticle's enormous data platform. Melissa discovered her love of massively-scaled systems while growing the Bing backend, where she honed the art of keeping highly-available complex systems up while undergoing significant code churn. Now an engineering director with mParticle, she’s passionate not only about maximizing efficiency both in her product code and in her developer tools but also about sharing best practices among colleagues and the tech world at large.

Aprajita-Mathur
Guardant Health

Aprajita Mathur is a mom, inventor, mentor and international speaker with an engineering background in Bioinformatics. She has more than 15+ years of software testing experience. She has worked on a wide range of products like instrument software, LIMS, integrated solutions and data analysis pipelines which are used in the fields of agriculture , transplant genomics, forensics and oncology. Currently she leads the Bioinformatics Software Test team at Guardant Health, which is a leading precision oncology company dedicated to helping conquer cancer through their proprietary blood tests, vast data sets, and advanced analytics. She also leads the chapter for “Women Who Test” in the bay area and hopes to grow this community. In her spare time, she loves to catch up on sleep and write new songs for her son.