Ministry of Testing Edinburgh May Event

Quality Engineering and Inclusivity

5:45 - 6:15 - Sign in / networking

6:15 - 6:45 - Demystifying Quality Engineering with Ishita Gupta

6:45 - 7:05 - Giving Voices Equity: Inclusive Teams Create Inclusive Products with Paul Alexander

7:05 - 7:25 - Comfort break / food and drink

7:25 - 8:15 - Digital Accessibility: A not so scary introduction and implementation talk with Joe Sathyan

8:15 - 8:30 - Wrapping things up

Joe Sathyan

Joe has been in the QA world for more than 20 years; in both the private and public sector. He started his career as a manual tester but now appreciate automated testing, performance testing, accessibility testing, Disaster Recovery, test management, assurance and contributing to tech delivery. He currently works for Scott Logic as a Lead Test Engineer, where he works with various clients as well as mentoring and building test teams.

More about Joe's talk: If we look around us we are humans with various capabilities and also certain limitations and we have made reasonable adjustments accordingly to make best use of the various services accordingly. This very much applies in the digital world, however, in spite of the increased awareness accessibility audits/tests comes pretty much towards the tail end of the SDLC. This little talk offers some pointers as to how and what we can do as professionals right at the start and how we can have a 'default audit' built into the CI/CD pipeline.

Paul Alexander

With a background in Financial Services, Paul's first testing role was with BNY Mellon. From there he went on to set up the QA department and offering at the digital agency Realise (Now Kin+Carta Connect). While at K+C Paul lead QA teams in Edinburgh and Manchester, working with many international brands on large scale website/platform builds, maintenance and campaign work. Paul also introduced QA as a 3rd party UAT and consultancy service. He is now working as QA Manager for the fantastic team at xDesign building 1st class web and app tools/experiences.

More about Paul's talk: Inclusion is at the heart of all great design. We have responsibility to create and build Inclusive and accessible products. Within our teams we share this responsibility but can we genuinely expect to design inclusively without providing equity of voice? In this talk I intend to discuss and demonstrate how the foundations of inclusion start from within. By utilising inclusive principles and tools we can unlock varied insights that we potentially miss out on traditionally.

Ishita Gupta

Ishita is currently working as Head of Quality Engineering in Luno, a cryptocurrency trading platform.

About Ishita's talk: Is Quality Engineering a mindset? Is it a process? Is it a type of testing? A short talk will demistify some concepts about Quality engineering and will help people to think about it and establish it beyond testing.

As usual, all from the tech industry are welcome, not just those from a Quality Engineering/Software Testing background!