Emerging Trends in Risk-infused Leadership

Airs on April 20th at 11:30AM (EDT)

Effective leadership in today’s business environment requires a keen understanding of risk and how to manage it. With new risks emerging all the time, it’s important for leaders to stay up-to-date on the latest trends and best practices for risk-infused leadership. We will explore the emerging trends that will shape the next five years and the pivotal role risks play in leading people, scaling processes, controlling technology, and governing organizations. The risk-infused leadership is already on the rise requiring leaders to stay ahead of the curve.

Topics covered in this session include:

• The latest trends and best practices in risk management

• Strategies for identifying and assessing new and emerging risks

• Balancing risk and Innovation in decision-making

• Cultivating a culture of resilience and adaptability

• Developing leadership skills to manage risk and uncertainty

Are You Scaling Agile or Failing Agile?

Airs on April 20th at 2PM (EDT)

One of the limitations of standard agile methodologies is that they are designed to operate primarily at the team level, with product owners, developers, testers, and other disciplines working together as a single team. So when you want to adopt agile practices on large programs or within large organizations, you will need to think about how do you scale your agile processes. However, many of the “off the shelf” agile processes are not really agile at all, resulting in organizations breaking one of the cardinal rules of the agile manifesto - individuals and interactions over processes and tools- taking SAFe, Nexus or any other prescribed methodology and force-fitting it will result in your team failing rather than scaling.

In this talk, I will discuss different ways you can incrementally scale up your use of agile approaches in an organization, use tools and processes intelligently (and sparingly) and makes sure it is driven by your needs and business value rather than some abstract framework. The key takeaways will be (1) understanding the limits of agile in larger contexts, (2) ways to allow complex organizations to embrace agile without micromanagement and bureaucracy, (3) case studies of successful and failed attempts to scale agile.

Breaking Out The Silo - Bridging Gaps Between Testing Teams In Your Organization

Airs on April 20th at 1PM (EDT)

How often have you felt you are the last team in your organization to know about a feature before it reaches the customer? Have you felt like there is a divide between the testing team and other engineering or product teams within your organization? At Storyblocks, we have built the bridge between product, engineering, stakeholders, and our testing team forming a productive and cooperative environment. In this session, we will walk through how our testing team has built that relationship over time. We will review why testing teams may find themselves isolated in their organization to the point where the relationship between the testing team and others feels combative. We will review the impact this has on the organization. We’ll look into strategies such as building communication, empathy, early team-building exercises across teams, and trust or testing as a whole team approach to help dig out of the silo and create open communication channels shared across your org.

A WholeHearted Approach to Technical Leadership - Pricilla Bilavendran

Airs on April 20th at 2AM (EDT)

Did you inherit a new engineering team, while gaining additional leadership responsibilities during this global pandemic? As an engineering leader, I knew that I would have to rely on more than just my technical knowledge to integrate and scale my teams, while also focusing on building an inclusive, EQ-savvy global workforce. Emotional intelligence, as cited by Harvard Business Review, accounts for nearly 90 percent of what sets high performers apart from peers with similar technical skills and knowledge. In this talk, I will share my personal experiences as a technical leader scaling teams, what leaders should look for when focusing on self and mental wellness, and concrete strategies to bring back to you and your teams as wholehearted leaders.

Thriving in a Downturn - Cara Dello Russo

Airs on April 20th at 7PM (EDT)

During shaky economic times, we have seen companies quickly shed portions of their workforce. However, to survive, businesses must keep project development on track, even in light of the lost expertise and smaller teams. How can companies continue to output innovative technology while simultaneously downsizing their day-to-day workforce? To be flexible and responsive to changes, one solution is to fill skill gaps quickly and effectively through staff augmentation and managed teams. In this session, we will explore the pros and cons of these alternative workforces, and highlight case studies and best practices for a company considering this path.

The Safari Way to Success & Happiness - Steve Fredlund

Airs on April 20th at 3PM (EDT)

As the leader of your work safari, how do you get the right peeps in your jeep? Do you feel like you are hiring the right people? Are they sticking around and being as productive and engaged as you hope? How do you work with your current team members to get them more engaged? Do you feel like it’s just a numbers game; like if you keep hiring new people you will eventually have a great team? Do you find yourself hoping you will make the right hire? Or hoping that people will start to “get it”?

Hope is not a strategy.

Steve Fredlund is a long-time actuarial leader who analyzed data on more than 150,000 global employees. The analysis is clear: productivity, engagement and retention are driven by alignment and connection; alignment with the organization's vision and values and connection to other people and the mission. Even more shocking is what does not drive results: SKAs (skills, knowledge, abilities), salary, bonuses, benefits, flexibility and recognition.

These are surprising, largely underutilized insights. We keep hiring based on SKAs because that’s what we have always done, that’s how Human Resources supports us, and that’s how our automated systems are set up. These systems can be efficient and help us CYA, but the reality is they don’t work. The skills, knowledge and abilities of those entering our organization is not correlated to their productivity, engagement and retention.

Steve is known as “The Safari Dude” because he has led several safari trips to Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania. He learned the importance of clarity, intentionality and accepting the unexpected on these African safaris; the same traits that brought him success in Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits and entrepreneurial endeavors.

Throughout this engaging presentation, Steve uses stories from the Serengeti to relay critical insights about leadership and building powerful teams.

The Safari Way is an approach to life, work and leadership that reflects an African safari resulting in epic success and happiness. The Safari Way is grounded in clarity of experience wanted and people needed, intentionality and courage in decision-making, and embracing the ups and downs that are part of every epic adventure.

Agile is Evil - Bradley Baird

Airs on April 20th at 6:30PM (EDT)

At least, it looks like it from a QA perspective.
Let’s be honest ~ Agile is not business as usual. Are you working for a company that has transitioned from other types of development models to Agile? If so, did you change your QA methodologies? If you did, why? If you did not, why? You say you are an Agile shop, really? How do you organize your QA efforts? Why do we even care, I mean, is this really even a talking point? Agile does have its place, and this session will explore what the place is and how Agile and QA can co-exist.

Secret Tools for Leadership & Innovation - Kerry "KG" Butler

Airs on April 20th at 3AM (EDT)

KG exposes the impact of some of the most well-researched and effective tools of great leaders. His talk tackles specific leadership skills and techniques that leaders of all levels can use.

Seven Ways to Collaboratively Assess Product Risks - Sanne Visser

Airs on April 20th at 5AM (EDT)

This presentation will show you seven ways to discover product risk. Seven methods I use when I need to find a way to do an assessment collaboratively. On top of this overview, I will add my recommendations on when to use each option and which works well in virtual meetings, and which needs a face-to-face option for optimal results.

The seven methods are:
1. Riskstorming (Testsphere cards)
2. Would Heu-risk it?
3. Stack Ranking
4. PRA - Product Risk Assessment
5. Nightmare headline game
6. Risk Poker
7. Threat Modelling

Building Quality - Mesut Durukal

Airs on April 20th at 12AM (EDT)

After joining or starting a new project, there is a long and tricky way to build a QA process from scratch. Building a proper quality assurance environment can be achieved by collaboration with all the parties in the team. After talking to product owners, development members, and project leaders, many initiatives can be started to improve products and processes like feature housekeeping, maintaining testability, reducing flakiness, and test breakage. Achieving all these is not a piece of cake. As a tester, sometimes you must act like a quality coach, be dedicated, and encourage people to partner with you in the initiatives. You should do various benchmarking studies and analyze the results to understand the pros and cons. You should explain your intentions and goals tirelessly.

I have collected what challenges we encountered and how we solved them to have a reliable quality environment in various projects:

• How we managed to test a complex and complicated SUT

• How we managed releases

• How we reduce testing efforts before shipment

• How we maintain the stability of CI/CD.

A few of the solutions we applied are as follows:

• Define processes like Bug Life Cycle and Test Case Life Cycle

• Build Workflows like Code Review Guidelines, Acceptance/Exit Criteria

• Decide Tools: Issues, Tasks, Tests, Results, Code

• Maintain Tests: Coverage, Suite Management, Markers

• Automation: Implement the skeleton: Flexible enough for further improvements, Robust and open for RCA, Reporting

• Define Levels and Subsets: Priorities for the executions

Putting The "Explore" Back Into Exploratory Testing - a Fun VR Demo - Paul Maxwell Waters

Airs on April 20th at 1AM (EDT)

Exploratory Testing is a common and effective method of studying an application and finding bugs (and a lot of fun!). Still, it suffers from misconceptions, can be hard to do effectively, and is even harder to teach. At worst, it reverts away from the fun and mindful, focused discovery to either mindless ad-hoc testing or loose checking of requirements and thus loses its power. This talk and demonstration will tackle the main misconceptions of exploratory testing, provide tools to enhance your skills and focus on ways to train others to take a more "exploration" approach to their testing - culminating with a fun, mob-test style structured exploratory test participation of a VR environment. The kind of thing that puts the "fun" and "explore" back into Exploratory Testing!

IoT Software System Testing and Security Assessment - Jon Hager

Airs on April 20th at 4PM (EDT)

To succeed, teams must ensure the quality of IoT systems. This session considers the subsequent explosion in our industry—of IoT— on qualities, being agile, and security testing viewpoint. Jon starts with an overview of the Internet of Things (IoT), V&V, and testing. Next, we will take a look at how to do IoT test planning and strategy over the full life cycle, including the impact of data analytics and AI.

The session will consider IoT security testing and various test techniques, patterns, attacks, and more that teams can apply now. This information is based on Jon's recently published book: IoT System Testing.

Defining Successful DevOps Test Automation - Anastasios Daskalopoulos

Airs on April 20th at 10:30AM (EDT)

As Development and Release cycles become faster and shorter, the test effort must also become faster, but at the same time, not lose any coverage, reliability, or accuracy. Because testing is one of the major elements in the DevOps cycle, we must ask how can testing, specifically for DevOps test automation, play a major role in contributing to the production of reliable software that fills End User needs.
To do this, we must ask:
- What the end goal of test automation is in DevOps?
- How does DevOps test automation differ now from in the past?

We will look at the different types of test automation and how their results can tell us how to improve our tests.

How to Lead Through Uncertainty and Change - Rachel Cooke

Airs on April 20th at 10AM (EDT)

Change used to be a strategic choice. We planned for it, managed it, and led toward it. Now, change has pervaded nearly everything we do. Its constant presence has left many of us exhausted, overwhelmed, and lacking the confidence or certainty to march toward it.

This talk gives leaders the insight, tools, and clarity to lead themselves and their teams through whatever changes may come. It equips leaders to put on their own oxygen masks before leading their teams. It highlights the importance of purpose when the vision is not clear. And it equips leaders to discover the hindsight wisdom we've unwittingly collected in recent years to inform a smart, intentional path forward.