Fastest-growing global community
Abstract & Key takeaways
"7 things I learned to build highly effective onsite/offshore teams."
Venkataramana Edagottu
Bio:
From my 20+ years of experience working in tech and managing teams I realized that as leaders we not only need to consider our structure of the team, but also the alignment and purpose of the work the team does. This is to ensure that we have clarity on the value the team creates. In my opinion, a high performing team flourishes in an environment where they know exactly how they contribute to the organization’s purpose.
Synopsis:
If you are a supervisor or a team leader, you know how difficult it is to manage distributed teams with constant pressure to perform and deliver quality product/service on time. This is especially true for offshore teams who are on different timezones, regions, cultures and working styles. If you do not put in effort to come up with effective strategies to manage these teams, it may eventually lead to low team morale, disgruntled employees, and most importantly poor performance. This is the reason why companies are investing millions of dollars in training, organizational and team development.
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In this talk I will share key strategies to improve team's performance in delivering high value product/services to customers irrespective of their cultural and geographical differences. I will share proven techniques that help build high performing distributed teams. The tools and approaches I discuss will give the attendees a strategic and clear way to manage team processes and communication. These concepts will reinforce how to actually implement the principles in a real-world environment working with onsite/offshore teams to solve the pressing challenges.
Key takeaways-
• Key strategies to transform strong teams into high-performing and self-managed teams
• Tools and examples on how to practice these approaches as a daily ritual
• Inspire team and deliver exponential results
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"Building and Scaling a High Performing Global Quality Organization From Ground Up"
Sree Cheemalapati
Bio:
Sree works as a Director of Quality Engineering at Comfy, a Siemens Company. She is responsible for the overall planning, management, and coordination of Comfy’s global quality engineering activities to ensure the delivery of products that exceed customer expectations. She plays a key role in building Quality Culture across the organization, bringing awareness to embedding quality at all levels for optimum customer experience. With 20+ years of experience in the software industry, leading Quality Engineering at startup, medium and large companies, Sree brings a wealth of expertise in building and scaling teams and delivering results.
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Synopsis:
The key ingredient to building high performing teams is to have different perspectives. Having worked as a leader in tech across multiple continents, domains and companies has helped me get different perspectives about people, culture and technology.
Over the past decade, customer needs have increased exponentially and companies are trying hard to release great features much faster. Also, working with distributed teams has added a whole new level of complexity to this initiative.
In this talk, I will share my real life experience building and scaling Global Quality Organizations from the ground up in mid and large enterprises. I highlight the common challenges and lessons learned when leaders embark on these kinds of initiatives. Using the strategies I share in this talk, attendees will learn how to adapt their mindset and skillset to the current day and age of DevOps and Continuous Testing, with seamless integration of automation tools.
Key takeaways-
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What are the strategies to build a high performing global Quality Engineering team?
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What are the common obstacles QE/QA leaders face?
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How to have sustainable growth while building high performing Quality Engineering teams
"QA Principles"
James Hutchins
Bio:
Experienced Consultant with a demonstrated history of working in the management consulting industry. Skilled in Integrated Supply Chain Management, Configuration Management, Quality System, Customer Engagement, and Production Process Development.
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Synopsis:
The verbs used in the standards and the priorities therein. The conduct of being impartially objective The perspective of not following illegal orders from a customer and giving work arounds. Corrective action objectives These given with real life happenings. Preemptively I would use a quote from the actor Sidney Poitier “words have (legal) meanings…”
Many products contracted today for and intended for delivery to customers are no longer just mechanical or are entirely software. A brief exploration of the lifecycles of both, how they interrelate could be explored or carried out in a follow on QA TechTalk Community discussion. Also, the modern emphasis on Mission Assurance vs potential delivery product failure as a topic.
Key takeaways-​
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The relationship of mechanical/software integrated development.
"Being a leader in Test Automation Arena"
Kushan Shalindra A
Bio:
I always strive to be a QA evangelist backed by emerging technologies, QA processes, concepts, and tools. I am is an active member/speaker at MeetUps. I have trained a large number of IT professionals from leading tech firms including Pearson, Virtusa, Eyepax, etc.
A quality-focused IT professional with more than 10 years of technical experience with a proven track record of heading medium to large-scale testing efforts, designing and implementing quality assurance solutions, and heading the Testing Center of Excellence. Innate ability to create innovative testing solutions, services, and processes to improve the bottom line by minimizing inefficiencies and thereby increasing the testing productivity and the value-added.
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Synopsis:
Test automation is one of the highly demanded areas of specialization in the QA community. Today every QA professional is needed to walk through this journey on their road to a successful career. Learning test automation is not just knowing Selenium. There is more to it. We need to know the process of creating the story of test automation in your project or organization, how to transform your team of manual QA professionals, what gourd work needs to be done, what are the do and don'ts for the team to be successful in the practice, what artifacts need to be there when implementing test automation. My talk will be a highly motivated and inspirational journey where I will share the journey of success being in the forefront in the test automation arena, which will be high energized takeaways for everyone in the audience to be high-class test automation, savvy professionals.
Key-takeaways:
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How a person doing manual testing transform their selves to technically savvy test automation professionals.
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What are the areas to consider when creating the test automation practice from scratch in your project or organization?
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What tools are suited to create a groundbreaking test automation practice
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How we should keep the momentum going in a test automation project and next step actions for any person to excel in the journey.
"Test Management as Lead"
Poornima Pujar
Bio:
I am a dynamic, versatile and hands-on Project Manager with eleven years of experience in Program & Project Management, System Integration, Technology Delivery, Transition, and Support in Information Technology. I lead teams to design and implement successful IT projects that align with the business objectives.
I am a certified Scrum Master with extensive experience of client liaison on projects and issues.Completed PRINCE 2 Project Management Certified.My present role is as a Quality Engineering Lead - R&D where I manage/oversee the delivery of a number of projects. I work with and direct PMO teams to develop high-quality programs that solve business problems and provide tangible results for enterprise-level IT systems and Solutions.
I have delivered projects covering business functions such as Telecom Billing, Online Convergent Charging,Service Managent, Digital transformation for various companies.Also I have delivery experience on market-leading technologies (e.g. CI/CD and Cloud Technologies - AWS ) using the best-in-class tool (e.g. JIRA, Confluence,TFS), etc. Leadership roles that demand an lot of collaboration, drive, passion and dedication are my forte.
Specialities:
Collaborative teamwork
Innovative IT initiatives
Team leadership
Strategy and execution
Commitment to excellence
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Synopsis:
Quality means doing it right even when no one is looking.”— Henry Ford In fast paced industry with frequent deployments and fast tracking depoyment of products with aggressive timelines need for well tested product and a well managed testing cycle is now more than ever.This talk would cover the test management activities managed as lead
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Key-takeaways:
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The session would cover Imporance of Test Management Processes , its prioritisation and collaboration as team. Take away also includes pointers on Managing the Test strategy , objective along with resource planning.
"Leadership in Testing"
Ashok Kumar
Bio:
Engineering Leader responsible for Test & Quality engineering within agile teams across all projects executed for Transunion Africa. Quality evangelist and test architect focused on shifting left quality.
Coached teams on the agile way of working and have played the role of scrum master for test automation architecture teams.
Certified Scrum Master (CSM) ,SAFe Agilist & AWS Certified Cloud Practioner with 16 Years experience in building test automation frameworks and test utilities.
Experience in Test Automation estimation, Test Driven Development & Automated Test Execution.
Successfully Delivered/Executed Quality Engineering Programs for major Fortune 100 Clients. Built High Performance Teams and motivated them to work on cutting edge technologies.
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Synopsis:
Test Leadership is critical to the success of any IT organization.In my presentation I talk about the common myths of leadership in testing, pitfalls regarding tools that test leaders often fall in to, the necessity to find the right balance between upskilling and reskilling for test teams.I also will talk about the evolution of the test leadership role in an Agile context and how it still continues to be relevant.
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Key-takeaways:
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Test Leadership, Owning Quality, Promoting the quality mindset, Test as a career path
"Test process improvement as a result of QA process audit"
Ramella Basenko
Bio:
Experience in web, mobile and desktop application testing
• Experience in API testing (Postman, automated collections)
• Experience in test documentation development (test cases, checklists, and status reports) using different test management systems and tools ( Confluence, Zephyr tool, HP Application Lifecycle Management tool, Qtest, TestRail etc)
• Experience in test planning, tasks estimation, risks analysis and mitigation, initial proposals creation
• Work experience with defect/tasks-tracking and management systems: Jira, Redmine, Fogbugs, Bugzilla, Mantis;
• Basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, SQL(simple requests, joins)
• Work experience on platforms: Windows, Linux, MacOS; Android, iOS and browsers: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge
• Theoretical and practical knowledge in automated software testing (Selenium + Java, Selenoid, TestNG), performance testing using Apache Jmeter;
• Theoretical knowledge of development methodologies (Waterfall, Scrum, Agile); Test process improvement models (TMMi, TPI Next); Types of test strategies (preventive, reactive, analytical, model-based etc)
• Conducting QA process assessments and audits, building improvement strategies;
• Experience in building and managing of dedicated QA groups (3-15 people) from scratch, QA groups within product team, managing short time projects and QA activities within them
• Strong computer background, analytical skills, attention to details
• Active, purposeful, tolerant, hard-working
• Active speaker of webinars and conferences
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Synopsis:
Do you consider the QA process on your project to be ideal, or at least close to ideal? Would you like to change something? During our webinar , we will discuss methods for assessing the QA process on a project, and also try to figure out how to optimize the existing process taking into account the emerging problems. In addition, we will try to answer the frequently asked questions of our customers ‘why does testing take so long? ‘ and ‘ why are bugs coming from support? ’. Try to audit your processes before it is done for you'
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Key-takeaways:
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During presentation you will learn what QA process audit is and what types are they. We will discuss key points related to industry-standard test process improvement models and some thoughts about from what to start if you are planning to conduct Test process audit. At the end of the entire presentation speaker will share example from her experience when QA audit was applied to one of her company's projects.
"from QA to QE"
Steven Devonport
Bio:
In my testing career I've held many different roles and each one has taught me something new such as how to improve my communication skills or how important curiosity is for a tester - which is a real positive as I'm obsessed with learning something new.
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I've worked across many different industries: telecoms, financial services, higher education and entertainment - for many different companies and I've held many different testing roles: analyst, lead, manager, and senior-manager. In short I've gained a lot of practical knowledge, experience, and insights into how testing can be utilised to deliver customer value quicker, smarter, and reliably.
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Amongst the many things I'm proud of throughout my career the one thing that sticks out the most is the number of times I've been invited into a company to build their testing capability from scratch - being that first tester can be very challenging - especially when I had to convince my peers of the value in having testers - and very rewarding when it all just comes together.
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Key-takeaways:
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Get a step by step guide to becoming a Test Automation Engineer and beyond
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