Biography

Christian is a senior software tester with 15+ years of experience in the field. He has successfully held different roles in the context of testing: Test Automation Engineer, Agile Tester, Test Team Lead, Test Project Manager and Exploratory/ Functional/ Manual Tester.

During his career he worked with various test (automation) tools such as Cucumber, Selenium, Watir and others using programming languages like Java, Ruby and C#, but also applied certain development/ testing methodologies such as Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) and Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD). Furthermore he successfully applied different manual testing techniques, such as Agile Testing, Rapid Software Testing (RST), Black Box Software Testing (BBST), Exploratory Testing (ET) and Session Based Test Management (SBTM) or ISTQB.

Christian is strongly driven by his context, always searching for the best fitting solution for a given situation. He´s able to understand business´ and people´s problems, and is always eager to learn and improve himself, while staying curios, open minded and willing to share his knowledge.

Talk

Extreme Learning Situations as Testers – How to Add Value While You’re Still Learning

As software testers, we accept that each new role will require us to learn new technologies and skills. We also know that we often feel the need (or are told of the need) to provide value to the project quickly. Both of these competing expectations are normal to a certain degree. When Christian joined a new project about testing an API against a European Union standard for payment services, he had to do both to an extreme he never experienced before.

The list of things to learn from almost the ground was long: an API and how to test it (including exploratory, automated and performance testing), understanding more than 400 pages of specification and learning the business domain. Despite this, other project members were expecting valuable contributions from him shortly after joining.

In this talk Christian will share his story and the strategies he used to manage this challenge. He’ll go into:
– How to find out what the most important priority is
– Dealing with multiple parallel tasks without losing focus through too much context switching
– Learning while doing
– Expectation management
– Keeping myself healthy despite of the challenges

Christian will package his experiences in lessons learned you can use to make solid progress in conditions of uncertainty, and in need of learning new tools, techniques and products.

In summary, he’ll look at what aspects testers and other IT professionals can take to reduce these sorts of situations, while also providing takeaways on how to deal with them in case you are in this kind of project.

Takeaways:
– Learn how to manage overwhelming learning requirements
– Protect your time and focus to enable continuous progress on the project
– Help you recognize and talk about such projects, even perhaps help to prevent

Session Keywords

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