Dear Friend,

The Test Leadership Congress is around the corner. Gain valuable insights from this year’s keynote speakers, Dave Snowden, chief   scientific officer of Cognitive Edge researcher in the field of knowledge management, known for the development of the award winning Cynefin framework and Jon Bach, Agile Transformation Coach at EBay, the author of most famous skilled testing technique Session Based Test Management.

Prof. DAVE SNOWDEN: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue …

The old wedding rhyme provides a basic structure to look how we make decisions under conditions of uncertainty; from strategic direction to operational decisions relating to software testing.  The presentation will combine insights from the natural sciences to provide a mixture of theory and practice that will challenge conventional thinking.  Complexity science deals with systems with inherent uncertainty, where specific outcomes cannot be forecast and risk needs to be managed in different ways.  Measuring attitudes to quality is more effective than compliance measure, the former being a lead indicator, the latter a retrospective measure.  For human society experience, heuristics and abductive thinking all arise from apprentice models of learning; practices are context specific not context free and do not respond well to the type of engineering approaches associated with systems thinking which has dominated the last few decades.

Dave Snowden was formerly a Director in the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management where he led programmes on complexity and narrative. He is a leading keynote speaker at major conferences around the world and is known for his extensive use of stories to communicate what would otherwise be difficult concepts. Dave Snowden has an MBA from Middlesex University and a BA in Philosophy from Lancaster University. He teaches on various university programmes throughout the world. He regularly consults at the board level with some of the world’s largest companies as well as to Government and NGOs.

JON BACH: Rethinking your Testing Role.

If you’ve seen testing become more shallow in your company, don’t be dismayed.  It could be that it’s simply taken on a different form or needs your help to get it back on track in a novel way.  Jon will talk about his reinvention from Test Manager to Agile Coach in his 6 years at eBay – a journey that included mindset reframes such as “Live Site Quality Director”, “Quality PM”, “Quality Evangelist”, and “Engineering Excellence Lead”.  Roles like these were Jon’s way of preserving his passion for testing and may show you some patterns of values and ethics lurking in your own career.

Takeaways:

•             What are the meanings and purposes of roles on projects?

•             What are the potential roles of skilled testers in projects, no matter the job title?

•             How can you create and maintain a testing culture?

Jon Bach is leading reinvention at eBay as an Agile Transformation Coach.  That means he looks for patterns and practices meant to improve developer productivity while also helping teams understand overall product health.  He’s the younger brother of famed software consultant James Bach, who showed him what testing was all about in 1995.   Since then, he’s made a career in software testing, focusing on the thinking, craftsmanship, and fun of finding problems.  His blog archive is called “Tested” and can be found at https://jonbox.wordpress.com/.

Get tickets at Early Bird Prices until March 26th.

http://testleadershipcongress-ny.com/index.html

Warm regards,

Anna.