Inspiration ...and Burnout - Maryam Umar

Talk Description

I come from a household of high achievers. Our parents never asked to be awesome in what we studied. They always had this unsaid expectation. Luckily, I did really well throughout school, college and university. I like to think I got my dad’s sense of achieving and my mum’s great way of organising her tasks. From my teens onwards, I started developing a high sense of perfection for every-thing I took on. However, I did not realise that how having this high bar was slowly consuming me.

I like to think that choosing a profession in quality assurance was a result of wanting to use perfect products. So what better way than to participate in ensuring quality for them. However, I found that trying to achieve this awesomeness slowly engulfed me. The need to be constantly producing high quality deliverables added stress to my life and slowly started to cause burnout. I will talk about how I created a mini Personal Development Life Cycle and how I used my learnings from being in agile teams to being Agile about this PDLC.

Takeaways

• creating a better balance in an agile team
• watching out for signs indicating burnout
• great products are important but so are you

By the end of this session, you'll be able to:

Maryam Umar

Head of QA

I work in London as Head of QA of an Instant Salesware firm. I started my career 15 years ago as a QA test engineer in the finance and mobile industry. After transitioning to the eCommerce sector, I performed QA in various capacities for online restaurant and travel services. I continue to work in QA as a manager now with special focus on sustainable delivery practices. I pay special attention to team dynamics and ensuring engineers are in roles which give them a sense of purpose. In addition to this, I have been a keen advocate of creating and sustaining diverse teams by speaking at schools and universities to educate students about what a creative space the technology sector can be.