EuroSTAR Conference

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Track Talk Th14

That Which isn’t Good for the Hive, isn’t Good for the Bee

Sanne Visser

14:15-15:00 CEST Thursday 15th June

Success stings if it comes at the expense of the hive.

As a child at school, I adored getting gold star stickers. As an adult, like a good worker bee I strived for excellent performance reviews and employee of the month recognition. Add to that achieving external recognition, for example the Rising Star award I won back in 2018, and I felt like a queen bee. However, I have come to realise how damaging these competitive and hierarchical structures are. Especially within teams that rely on working well together. So I have decided to recover from my love of gold stickers because it’s actually team work that runs a healthy hive.

Competition doesn’t deliver what you think it does. Rarely does competition enhance collaboration or mutuality, but it does reinforce silos and restricts the flow of information. How about instead we leave no hive behind?

Removing what’s unhealthy for the hive also means addressing some of these bee-liefs.

Someone has to ‘run the hive’ and tell us what to do. Don’t they?

If competition disappears, won’t people stop buzzing around?

When I don’t have clear goals, nectar to collect. How will I tell if I’m successful?

As a recovering gold-sticker-addict, I’ll share how my thinking on these topics has changed and how it’s influencing my job as a tester. We are all bound up in this thing called software development together and these old structures hurt us, it’s time to dismantle them. Let’s build some excellent beehives instead.

What you will learn

  1. Competition doesn’t deliver what you think it does.
  2. Working well together requires dismantling competitive and hierarchical structures.
  3. How to recover from gold-star addiction and what to do instead.

Session Details

  • Intermediate
  • 45 Minutes
  • Includes 15mins Q&A
  • Creating Healthy Organisations
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Session Speaker

ES2023-Speaker-Sanne-Visser

Sanne Visser

Test Manager – Capgemini, Netherlands

Sanne Visser is a test manager at Capgemini in the Netherlands. She has more than 10 years experience in software testing. Throughout her career she has worked on a wide variety of projects from insurance systems to railway software solutions. Her main technical focus is E2E testing in complex software systems. She was chairperson of the blockchain testing community from 2018 to 2021. Sanne is a part-time stoic and loves talking to her team about learning resilience using stoicism. Her motto is “Every effort is beautiful, you are what you do everyday”.

More sessions from this speaker
EuroSTAR 2023 Panel Session
9 out of 10 Testers Find These Things Most Annoying…

14:00-15:00 Friday 16th June

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