How Diversity Challenged Me to Be Innovative as Test Team Leader
W5 Start Time : 11:00 End Time : 11:45
WATCH: Nathalie’s preview of her talk
Over a year ago I decided to change jobs. From being an Expert Group Leader and Test manager at a large international secondment company to the position of Test Team Leader at a much smaller, local underwriter. I imagined that I would get the opportunity to learn people management skills. As it turned out; it has brought me more challenges and I still have miles to go, but I’m anxious to share my journey and the tips, tricks and pitfalls I have encountered so far.
Travelling back in time
It’s weird to come to the realization that you are now working at a company that has the IT department that you knew from fifteen years ago. But here I was; IT deciding what the business needs and delivering what they don’t. Hear about what every consultant should know, what you and I secretly know and ignore for the sake of keeping the motion when wanting and needing to change and when implementing a testing process.
Kneading 15 (cynical and skeptical) individuals into 1 (motivated) team.
Metallica has written a song about this: ‘ Broken, beat and scarred’ and this is what I thought upon meeting my team. 15 individual people who were working at an organizational entity called ‘test’ in different projects and who were cynical and skeptical towards (almost) everything. People doing everything to deliver and who were severely undervalued (taunted). This is how we steered the ship in the other direction to sunnier shores.
The challenge of challenging : letting 15 individuals perform as good as they can.
Easy or hard to motivate, people who already have loads of domain knowledge but no testing knowledge, people who know their testing but have no clue on the domain and so on. Each and every person I evaluated and I searched for an individual challenge so they could shine again. How to do this and what to look out for is what I tell about in this session.
Being innovative in learning and sharing knowledge
Learning with lollypops, leaflets on the coffee machine, knowledge sessions, grabbaball and ‘ on the wall’ are ways I used to educate people and to let them share their knowledge in a very cost effective way. By sharing my experiences I hope to provide some inspiration and ideas for you to take with you and I hope the audience will also be inspired by this track to share their ideas that they might have related to these topics.
Speaker
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Nathalie is a Test team Leader at an underwriter called Turien en Co. in Alkmaar in the Netherlands. She’s been involved in IT (professionally) since 1997 and is involved Software Testing since 2004. She is very passionate about (software) testing in general, but the subjects Data Warehouse Testing, E2E-testing, Standardization, Ethics/Philosophy and Test Architecture (Framework) are most favorite.
She speaks on national and international test events on regular basis, writes in specialist publications and she’s a BNTQB board member. She’s married, has no kids and is a very enthusiastic Casualty Simulation Victim. She’s a FunTESTic TestFanatic and proud of it!
W5 Start Time : 11:00 End Time : 11:45
WATCH: Nathalie’s preview of her talk
Over a year ago I decided to change jobs. From being an Expert Group Leader and Test manager at a large international secondment company to the position of Test Team Leader at a much smaller, local underwriter. I imagined that I would get the opportunity to learn people management skills. As it turned out; it has brought me more challenges and I still have miles to go, but I’m anxious to share my journey and the tips, tricks and pitfalls I have encountered so far.
Travelling back in time
It’s weird to come to the realization that you are now working at a company that has the IT department that you knew from fifteen years ago. But here I was; IT deciding what the business needs and delivering what they don’t. Hear about what every consultant should know, what you and I secretly know and ignore for the sake of keeping the motion when wanting and needing to change and when implementing a testing process.
Kneading 15 (cynical and skeptical) individuals into 1 (motivated) team.
Metallica has written a song about this: ‘ Broken, beat and scarred’ and this is what I thought upon meeting my team. 15 individual people who were working at an organizational entity called ‘test’ in different projects and who were cynical and skeptical towards (almost) everything. People doing everything to deliver and who were severely undervalued (taunted). This is how we steered the ship in the other direction to sunnier shores.
The challenge of challenging : letting 15 individuals perform as good as they can.
Easy or hard to motivate, people who already have loads of domain knowledge but no testing knowledge, people who know their testing but have no clue on the domain and so on. Each and every person I evaluated and I searched for an individual challenge so they could shine again. How to do this and what to look out for is what I tell about in this session.
Being innovative in learning and sharing knowledge
Learning with lollypops, leaflets on the coffee machine, knowledge sessions, grabbaball and ‘ on the wall’ are ways I used to educate people and to let them share their knowledge in a very cost effective way. By sharing my experiences I hope to provide some inspiration and ideas for you to take with you and I hope the audience will also be inspired by this track to share their ideas that they might have related to these topics.
Speaker
Nathalie is a Test team Leader at an underwriter called Turien en Co. in Alkmaar in the Netherlands. She’s been involved in IT (professionally) since 1997 and is involved Software Testing since 2004. She is very passionate about (software) testing in general, but the subjects Data Warehouse Testing, E2E-testing, Standardization, Ethics/Philosophy and Test Architecture (Framework) are most favorite.
She speaks on national and international test events on regular basis, writes in specialist publications and she’s a BNTQB board member. She’s married, has no kids and is a very enthusiastic Casualty Simulation Victim. She’s a FunTESTic TestFanatic and proud of it!