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Vojtěch Barta photo

Vojtěch Barta

Vendavo CZ (CZ)
Vojtěch Barta has been in the area of Quality Assurance for almost 10 years now. His motto is “Quality as satisfaction of all stakeholders” when the whole team needs to be aligned about it.

He has worked in several different roles like QA, Tester, Lead of QA department, Business Analyst, etc. His current role is QA Mentor. He does mentoring with his main mission being to help others to understand the concept of “whole team responsibility for quality”, supporting everybody in this challenging change of mind.

Vojtěch has a good understanding of and experience with Agile development, mainly with Scrum and Kanban. He is open minded and always thinks in the context of each particular project applying his experience to achieve the project goals without compromising the quality of the delivery. He worked on multicultural projects, both distributed and collocated.

Quality Assurance is far more than only testing. However, testing is an important piece of the puzzle. Vojtěch likes balance between structured and unstructured testing when effective test automation is the key to success.

Vojtěch likes to share his ideas and experience with others. It is important to give something back to the community. That is why Vojtěch decided to become a speaker on testing and agile conferences.

"I believe quality should be defined as satisfaction of all stakeholders. I find it to be far behind requirements, implementation, testing, etc."

"Of course, these are all still important activities but you are as good in them as you are goo in other aspects Agile encourages you to do, like communication, interaction, trust, commitment, etc."

"I have been in QA area for almost 10 years working in different roles - tester, QA, test automation, test management, mentoring."

About the Presentation

Mentoring in QA

If you work in large company with dozens of QAs on different projects, you should have some general Test Strategy and Process Guide.

Process Guide describes the way we deliver the solution when Test Strategy defines general test process with focus on defect prevention.

It is very important to really understand them as Templates or Guides = set of proposed best practices which should be applied on each particular project to achieve the same goals.

Here fun starts - Application on each project. Each project is unique driven by many factors when people are the critical one. Each QA can have different set of skills, attitudes; sometimes we have newbies, etc. Moreover, we need to go beyond the QA team because quality is responsibility of whole team.

Mentoring is the key activity to succeed. It would be nice if there could be mentoring from both point of views – QA and Development, but I think that QA Mentoring brings more benefits for entire team.

The best idea is to choose several most senior QAs in your company who are also equipped with good soft skills and build the mentoring around them. Every mentor will be responsible for several projects aiming for the same goals finding the best way how to reach them. They will be the ones helping all stakeholders to understand their responsibilities supporting them by advices, experience from other projects, smoothing the edges, sometimes even shadowing.

Mentoring should be always structured and all mentors should align about the basic strategy and goals. I recommend you to create mentoring checklist to formalize it. I will provide you with the most important areas in such checklist during my speech (entire checklist can be downloaded from conference site).

My experience is that mentoring will also motivate your QAs because everybody needs to see you care.

In partnership with

If you would like to be a partner in organizing the conference, please, contact Csilla Kohl (csilla.kohl@hstqb.com).


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