STAREAST 2025 - Test Leadership
Wednesday, April 30
Building a QA Team from the Ground Up
At some point in your career - especially at newer companies and start ups, there might come a time when you are hired onto a development team as the very FIRST QA hire! With such an exciting opportunity, there is so much at stake. Your performance will not only depend on your testing skills, but your ability to add value to the development process AND the product! In this presentation Stephanie will go over her own experience building a QA team, and some important milestones and challenges she hit along the journey. She will talk about how to evaluate the team you are being hired into,...
How to Hire the Best Quality Engineers
Endless candidates, loops ending in no-hires, missing data to make an informed decision...hiring is hard. Plus, the cost of mis-hiring (and bringing on someone who isn't a good fit) is very high. But there is a better way. The first step is determining exactly what are the requirements that your candidate must have (hint: it's not a specific programming language or experience using a tool). Knowing what questions to ask which assess the core skills for the position is essential. Join George as he talks about how to find and hire the best Quality Engineers starting at resume reviews to...
Elevating Test Leadership: Strategies for Effective Team Management and Career Growth
Mastering test leadership involves not only guiding your team through complex testing scenarios but also fostering their professional development and advancing your own career trajectory. In today’s fast-evolving tech landscape, test leaders face the challenge of balancing rigorous quality assurance with identifying the talent, development of team’s skills and career trajectories. During his tenure as Practice Head of Quality Engineering at a major tech firm, Srinivas Rao Labhani implemented a comprehensive strategy of implementing a sense of belongingness to the organization, learning...
Thursday, May 1
Treat Your Test Tools Like a Real Product
Have you ever had a QA tool fail to gain momentum? Ever had a splintered array of test automation frameworks that does the exact same thing across your quality engineering organization? Ever have a hard time getting leadership to sign off for tools that you know could easily boost testing productivity? If you answered yes to any of these, come join Albrecht in this crash course in building your quality engineering roadmap. In this session, Albrecht will go over how to build a product roadmap that aligns with your organization's goals and identify key milestones, to ensure your toolset is...
Test Leadership & Career Development
Maxine Thompson's team at Progressive had experienced several issues where individual contributors sometimes got released from projects due to reported lack of skills in certain areas such as communication, leadership engagement, collaboration, domain knowledge, as well as occasional technical gaps. The team realized a gap in the knowledge, confidence, leadership, communication, and technical skills demonstrated by some of their quality assurance analysts. The question was how to upskill their ICs to meet and overcome these challenges in the face of emerging and constantly changing...