It’s Never Too Late to Change Your World
When is it too late to change your life? When are you too old to take a new direction? I’m Isabel Evans, and in my sixties, I changed my life radically—personally and professionally. When I look back 10 years I see someone unhappy, frustrated, and feeling a failure. In 2015 after years of family and work stress, I had a breakdown. From 2016 to 2019, my recovery included visits to Women Who Test that were fundamental in recovering my own self. Now I am almost 70 - I have a new home, a new life, and a new professional direction, and I am happy! In this presentation, I share my experience of walking away from what I had, to rebuild my world. I went back to college, studied for a PhD, and turned my life around. You can, too. This is an opportunity to thank all my friends at Women Who Test: your support gave me the confidence to try something new, to branch out and re-form myself. To all of you - thank you! And remember - it’s never too late!
After over 30 years in industry, software quality and testing practitioner Isabel Evans is now a post-graduate student at the University of Malta. Her research takes people-focused approach to designing tool support for testing. This arose from real-life experiences in industry and led to the academic papers: “Stuck in Limbo with Magical Solutions”, “Scared, Frustrated and Quietly Proud”, and “Test Tools: An Illusion of Usability”. Research continues with modelling and trialling a framework of heuristics to help teams design and assess test tools. Isabel authored Achieving Software Quality Through Teamwork and chapters in Agile Testing: How to Succeed in an eXtreme Testing Environment, Testing Practitioner, and Foundations of Software Testing. Isabel has chaired EuroSTAR (2019) and HUSTEF (2018), and presented popular tutorials and storytelling keynotes at conferences worldwide. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and received the 2017 EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award.