To test a product, there are so many questions to ask, and so little time in which to ask them. More often than not, we get caught up in the who, what, when, and how, but Jane Jeffers from Riot Games explains that “why…?” questions can be the most important ones to ask when it comes to QA work. When missing the whys, we can wind up only focusing on specific details like who needs to do the work or when our deadlines are, and subsequently lose the bigger picture of why a project matters, and why we do what we do. Learn some of the key ways that you can ask why for product, for process, and for people, and how the answers you get will help you with everything from how to devise your overall test strategy to how you communicate with your teammates to get them thinking about quality.

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The DevOps movement is front and center across enterprises. Companies with mature systems are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams and departments. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, development organizations have been filled with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. Adam Auerbach says this has to change. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding in order to stay relevant and add more value to the business. Based on his experiences at Lincoln Financial and Capital One, Adam explores what the DevOps movement is all about, its core values, and proven patterns for how testing must evolve.

You want to build an effective testing team, but you’re asking yourself, “Where do I begin?” Greg Paskal, a quality assurance engineer with over thirty years of testing experience, shares seven keys to building a successful testing team. Learn the fundamentals every tester should know and how to build upon them to achieve an effective manual and automated testing strategy. Greg’s minimal essential testing strategy (METS), coupled with his proven experience, will help you build an amazing testing organization. Greg will provide specific instruction through each of these seven areas, including fundamentals of software testing, how to begin implementing and executing the METS manual test strategy, outfitting your manual test team with automated testing, and the importance of building strategic partnerships across your IT and technology organization.

Retrospectives empower teams to learn and improve. But many teams fail to reach their true learning potential. Ryan was part of a team that held retrospectives for a year and a half to fix one line of code. Through the story of this team, he will show you how they turned their retrospectives from a meeting with meaningless action items to one that accomplished a meaningful improvement. Ryan will explore the resistance that was met and how it was overcome. He will show how to shift to a hypothesis-driven retrospective that to guides specific improvements and learning goals. His team made significant changes to their retrospectives and were rewarded with a radical improvement. Breaking through their retrospective impediments and finally embracing a learning mindset empower Ryan's team to fix the legacy line of code that had held the team back for over year.