Targeting Quality 2019

Lean Coffee is a meeting format focused on solving problems. Use it for retrospectives, team meetings, project meetings, or ice breakers. Want to use it as effectively as possible? Come learn the method, or go deeper into it, with one of the midwest's premier Lean Coffee-ists. (That's a thing, right?)

When you move to a new job, a new project, or just need to step back and look at everything from the beginning where do you start? Do you start with automation? Manual tests? Should you always consider both? What about working with developers, can they help? After attending this talk you will walk away with guidelines to steer you on starting (or restarting) your test plan, for not only testers, but developers and management as well.

Being a Test Manager is more than just ‘being the Boss’. Sure, there is direction to set, issues to address, hiring, performance reviews, status updates, and the list goes on. Managers want to empower their team members to make good decisions and execute well, but does that mean there’s nothing for a manager to do? How does one provide value when specific testing tasks are done by others? How does a manager go beyond ’being the Boss’ to actually helping their staff to do amazing work? Join Jeff Abshoff as he shares his experience working with new and seasoned testers, hear some of the struggles he has faced and gain some practical ideas for one-on-ones, team meetings, collaboration and growth challenges that you can bring back to your team in order to provide value.

Managers have the ability to split organizations into teams, programs and functions. This causes a deep level of ignorance, duplication of work, and less knowledge sharing or even worst. In this case, people feel they are working alone and not supported which is the main 'WHY' people left their job and start seeking for better scope.
In order to avoid all those problems, organizations are making new changes and ways of transformation to make their collaborators more fluid. That's why and how communities of practice are built. In fact, the main reason is to create a link between different people and connect them independently from which function and team they are working on.
Those communities offer multiple important advantages to members and to organization. In this talk, Emna will brings examples of community of practice development within Ministry of Testing Meetups. She will illustrate why communities of practice are an essential part of agile organization and what role they can perform in the short and long term. Also she will refer to the importance of gamification in building those communities and other helpful strategies to connect participants using different methods of fragmenting the organization such as spotify model.

Fostering good team dynamics is a difficult and thankless job, one that is often relegated to managers. Problematic personalities, clashing communication styles, egos… All thrown to our poor managers, to be dealt with from the top-down. But it doesn't have to be this way! The team dynamic is the responsibility of the entire team, to own, manipulate and tweak to their benefit. And it's not as scary as it sounds. But how do you know what makes a team dynamic good or bad? What's worth fixing and what do you work around instead? In this talk, I'll be sharing my experiences working with different teams - both good and bad - and what I've learned from them. What are the markers of a good team, and why? What adjustments can you make, or suggest to management, to improve a teams dynamic? What can you do to promote good working relationships with your team members?