Speakers

Independent quality and testing consultant Isabel Evans has more than thirty years of IT experience in quality management and testing in the financial, communications, and software sectors. Her quality management work focuses on encouraging IT teams and customers to work together via flexible processes designed and tailored by the teams that use them. Isabel authored Achieving Software Quality Through Teamwork and chapters in Agile Testing: How to Succeed in an eXtreme Testing Environment; The Testing Practitioner; and Foundations of Software Testing. A popular speaker at software conferences worldwide, Isabel is a Chartered IT Professional and Fellow of the British Computer Society, and has been a member of software industry improvement working groups.

Headline: My Failures in Software Testing

In over 30 years in the IT industry, Isabel says she has learnt more from her failures than she has from her successes. Why is this? And what has she learnt? That making mistakes is the way to learn, and that allowing yourself to be wrong allows you to grow.

Join Isabel at the HUSTEF 2016 conference to enjoy her greatest failures, and learn not to make the same mistakes she has made. Recently, someone described Isabel as unusual in the technology industries as she is an “elderly woman” so taking as her motto Bob Dylan’s line: “I was so much older then – I’m so much younger now” Isabel shares:

• Being generation A: growing old disgracefully in a young industry by continuing to fail, fail, and finally succeed;
• Imposter syndrome: accepting the burden of expertise means you are still allowed to fail as well as succeed; and
• Dealing with constant change: Do I have to? Really…? Now…? Again…? Knowing that when I change I am going fail before I learn to succeed in the new circumstances, means I have to embrace change.

We’ll visit a number of projects and organisations and see what Isabel would have done, given hindsight and the benefit of her current knowledge, and we’ll discuss how – even as an “elderly woman in tech” – Isabel is still planning to make more mistakes and learn more new skills and knowledge.