Call for Speakers — Opening Soon
Norwegian Flag

EuroSTAR Conference

Europe's Largest Quality Engineering Conference

Track Talk W9

Thanks, I Hate It: Being Grateful for Failure

Dylan Lacey

12:00-12:45 CEST Wednesday 8th June

Fail. Red Build. Outage. Regression.

If you’ve ever worked in DevOps, these phrases probably fill you with dread… But they shouldn’t! Failure is vilified, it’s judged, sometimes it’s punished… And it’s the default. Success is the exception.

I’m going to show you that Failure is a good thing, and how confidence without failure is False Confidence. We’re gonna look at the types of failure and discuss:

  • What they mean
  • What they actually mean
  • What we can do with the information

 

We’ll learn how to have more failures, about failure anti-patterns and pernicious Failure psychology. I’m going to present concrete examples of how failure helps organisations be more confident. There will be at least one chart (I apologize in advance).

Come find out why failure shouldn’t be a dirty word, why every Failure is a sign you’re doing things right. More failure makes for more success. If I fail to convince you… You’ll have to come to my talk to find out what I’ll do next 😉

What you will learn

  1. How to extract meaningful signals from failures
  2. The psychological impacts of failure (and how to overcome them)
  3. There are real economic benefits from embracing failure

Session Details

  • Introductory
  • 45 Minutes
  • Includes 15mins Q&A
  • People, Teams and Culture
Buy Conference Ticket

Session Speaker

Dylan Lacey EuroSTAR 2022 speaker

Dylan Lacey

Manager of Developer Relations – Sauce Labs, Australia

G’day! I’m Dylan, and I love to solve problems, help people, hold opinions, make things, and the oxford comma. Usually I do this with computers, although sometimes a kitchen and, on one memorable occasion, 120’000 bees.

I’ve been Engineering the Softwares for over 13 years; My very first job as a baby engineer had me setting up a Selenium grid and bullying browsers into submission. I’ve build an Uber competitor (it failed), multiple teams (they didn’t), and a dozen or so Open Source projects (they’re… mixed.). Oh, and did I mention the bees?

For the past 10 years I’ve been fixing Appium problems, dispensing Selenium advice and resetting passwords at Sauce Labs. As the Manager of Developer Relations, I love working to help developers provide digital confidence to their companies and customers.

BACK TO PROGRAMME

Stay in The Loop

Can’t wait for EuroSTAR 2026? Our 2-for-1 ticket offer is coming soon — pre-register now to be the first to know when tickets go live!