Improve your testing with slicing and data

Hi everyone!

We are delighted to announce our next meetup, where we have a couple of fantastic talks lined up for you to enjoy!

Many thanks to Version 1 for hosting and sponsoring - without sponsors it becomes impossible to hold events like this.

### Using Data to Drive Testing Decisions

When we’re testing software, we use a wide variety of tools and skills to drive our decision making. Often, we forget, don’t know how to use, or don’t have access to the right data to take our decision making to the next level. Leveraging the data available to us can give us a whole new perspective on the risks our business and team need to mitigate. Of course, data has its flaws too but that’s where a testing or problem solving mindset comes in. Combining a testing mindset with access to data allows us to unleash the potential power of both. Applying all of the skills we use when testing applications to analysing the data we have available to us can help us to decide when we should and shouldn’t rely on the data.

Join me to explore how data took my decision making process to the next level. You'll get insights into how leveraging the data available can bring whole new perspectives on the risk your business and team need to mitigate.

#### Takeaways

• You will be empowered to seek out and ask for access to data
• You will have examples of when data can help your whole team make decisions
• You’ll see how relying on data can help to mitigate huge risks and why relying completely on data is risky too

Speaker: Heather Reid
Heather is currently a Test Engineer at Glofox with 10 years of experience in the software industry working as a developer, software tester and community manager. Testing and helping the software testing community is her passion. When she's not testing she's usually exploring or working on restoration projects.

## Slice your cake and eat it too – How to deliver value and get quick feedback

When delivering software, the key mindset should be that we are always going to be wrong when deciding what to build. We need to get something in front of customers and find out where we’re wrong in order to act on feedback and deliver real value.

In Glofox, rather than planning we use slicing to take an incremental and iterative approach to solving our customers’ problems. This mitigates risks, delivers value and each slice offers an opportunity to learn and adapt quickly. A combination of monitoring in Production and customer feedback helps us assess the success of the release and informs us on what the next slice should be.

To be effective at delivering software that actually solves our customers’ problems we need to fail small to mitigate risk, fail fast to get quick feedback and learn and fail often to accelerate learning.

Key takeaways

• How testers can affect change in a team’s ways of working;
• How development teams can identify what our customers actually want;
• How having effective conversations within the team and with customers will lead to happier people
• How everyone working together results in higher quality software that gets released quicker

Speaker: Alex Morosan
Alex is originally from Romania, living in Northern Ireland, and has been testing software for over ten years in both the private and public sectors.
He advocates for a context-driven approach to testing, where we do the best testing we can and cope with new or unforeseen situations by increasing our knowledge of test techniques and understanding how to evaluate each project’s context. He is a strong believer that continuous self-learning and adaptability are the only ways to become a good, competent tester nowadays.