A theme that held true throughout the conference was that traditional roles such as Project Management, Business Analysis, Testing, Development and Infrastructure are changing and the lines are beginning to blur – with that in mind many of us need to think about multi-skilling, and from a testing perspective to change from being gatekeeper to trusted advisor and ultimately change the conversation from testing to quality. Quality is everyone’s responsibility.
The opening address by CIO and Executive General Manager of Bankwest, Andy Weir was just as poignant – there’s no escaping the fact that our environment is changing around us and it no longer matters which industry we belong to. Testing needs to evolve and become an enabler for great products, awesome quality and it needs to add more value earlier in the value chain.
TestWest began its story from testing but this year it went beyond just testing and covered topics, such as Autism, DevOps, User Experience (UX), Mobility and the Cloud, Infrastructure as a Service, and the future of Performance Testing – all of the topics were relevant to our changing environment.
With the need to evolve and transform, it is increasingly important for the testing community to engage, share, learn and adapt.
SoftEd were sponsors at the event, I was privileged to once again be co-MC for the TestWest Conference and our team spent an enjoyable day with customers asking them about their training needs – with the broad suite of courses on offer we got a feel for the type of training, testers and non-testers were interested in. Their requirements matched much of the focus of the conference, broadening your skill-set and becoming more adaptive. With more and more companies working within an Agile style framework there was interest in what the future tester will look like and what will set them apart from the Robots.
Post by Toby Thompson