Communicating in an Isolated & Decoupled World - Anne-Marie Charrett & AI Panel

For our April In-Person Meetup we have an extravaganza for you! The well-known and award winning Anne-Marie Charrett will be discussing a very prescient topic since COVID - on the challenges arising from Testing and Communicating in the Age of Remote Teams and Decoupled Microservices! We also have a panel discussion on AI and Quality Engineering with some great panelists booked!

Anne Marie Charrett's talk - "Communicating in an
Isolated & Decoupled World"

"At work, remote first has become the new black. Our meetings are now on zoom; our jokes have emoticons, 🥑 and our standups are async. Chatbots remind us to WOL (Work out Loud) or TOL (Talk out Loud).
But it goes further. Technology-wise, our microservices architecture and CI/CD infrastructure demand isolate and decouple our features into micro-stories separating us from our customers. Concepts such as Team Topologies encourage us to divide our teams into stream-aligned customer-facing, platform, or enabling teams.

Our context has changed, and we must learn to adapt as software professionals. We must revisit how we work, communicate, test and build software. Effective communication requires intentional and deliberate design.

What was once a casual chat by the water cooler must be designed purposefully and included in formal meetings. Where you once relied on non-verbal cues, the written word requires more thought; comments must be carefully chosen and tested for ambiguity.

In a nutshell, we need to relearn how we communicate. We need to build collaboration into our systems, understanding that there's a time when it's essential but also allowing time for creativity and quietness.
It's a brave new world. Are you ready to be intentional about it?

Takeaway 1
We need to rethink how we communicate given our new contexts

Takeaway 2
When and how we communicate is critical to the message being heard

Takeaway 3
Making collaboration intentional so our voices are heard
"

Anne-Marie Charrett is a software engineer & founder of Testing Times; a consultancy focused on solutions in quality engineering. An electronic engineer by trade, quality chose Anne-Marie when she discovered compliance did not necessarily mean fit for purpose.

As an adjunct professor at UTS, Anne-Marie created and delivered courses on software testing. She has also been an instructor for the online BBST (BlackBox Software Testing) classes. She is the former Director of Quality at Culture Amp, using a quality coach model to help product teams deliver quality at speed.

In 2022, Anne-Marie was awarded the Eurostar 2022 Award for Software Testing Excellence. Anne-Marie is the author of the quality coach book and writes at https://annemariecharrett.com. She offers the occasional tweet @charrett

Panel Discussion - AI and Quality Engineering

We will have 4 or 5 people discussing and taking questions from the audience on topics related to AI in Quality Engineering - testing of AI applications or using AI to improve our work!

Panellists -

Robbie Lambe - previously a QA Leader at Amazon, established and directed the quality assurance function, and testing engineering strategy for Amazon Alexa in AZ & NZ

Amruta Pande - Quality assistance expert working at Canva. She has over a decade of experience in software testing across banking, healthcare, and graphic design sectors, ensuring robust performance and user-centric products. She has also recently led the testing for some of the AI features released by Canva.

Paul Maxwell-Walters - QA Team Lead at Practera, whose article on testing ChatGPT integration and responses for student assessments in an education context was recently published by Ministry of Testing.

Pavithra Navaneeth - As the Principal QE at Westpac, Pavithra brings over two decades of hands-on technical expertise and leadership in the realm of software quality. With a strong foundation in test automation and quality engineering, she has been instrumental in implementing best practices and enhancing the quality engineering capabilities at an enterprise level. Recently, she has pioneered experiments around the usage of Copilot in the quality engineering space and advocates for its use to increase productivity.

UIPath Showcase.

Peter Graves from Innovo will showcase the UiPath AI-driven testing and Autopilot for Test Suite, accelerating every testing lifecycle phase. Generate tests from requirements, generate code from comments and surface actionable insights from execution results.

Come, learn and take part in the discussion about these most important and prescient topics. You will also get to mingle and socialise with your fellow testers, along with making connections. Not to be missed!

Doors open from 5:15PM onwards - Pizza & Beer will be served.