Quality doesn’t belong with the tester! – Maaret Pyhäjärvi

14th May 2015
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Maaret Pyhäjärvi's profile
Maaret Pyhäjärvi

Testing Specialist and Development Manager

Quality doesn’t belong with the tester! – Maaret Pyhäjärvi image
Talk Description

If it doesn’t work in production, was it badly tested? Or, is it that testing – like use in production – shows problems that were already there, but without trying them early on, the problems remain in production?

This presentation deals with the biggest learning over the years as tester that I’ve needed to pick up: while it’s great that I’m useful and needed, I need to actively work towards being less needed by teaching more testing skills to all team members and always remember that the quality belongs with the developer. It was already broken, I did not break it, and learning to break it less is a valuable thing developers pick up with testing skills.

We look at an example of a team that, learning to rely on the tester, ended up with worse quality than without a tester. We’ll also look at the practical steps of assigning responsibilities and pairing up and test automation effort that helped bring things back in balance.

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

  • TBA
Testing Specialist and Development Manager
Maaret Pyhäjärvi is a software professional with a testing emphasis. She identifies as an empirical technologist, a tester and a programmer, a catalyst for improvement and a speaker. Her day job is working with a software product development team as a hands-on testing specialist. On the side, she teaches exploratory testing and makes a point of adding new, relevant feedback for test-automation-heavy projects through skilled exploratory testing. In addition to being a tester and a teacher, she is a serial volunteer for different non-profits driving forward the state of software development. She was recently awarded as Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person 2016. She blogs regularly and is the author of Mob Programming Guidebook.
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