F12 – 401: Don’t Ignore the Man Behind the Curtain

Track: Leadership Perspectives for Testers

Just as in the Wizard of Oz where all the great pyrotechnics going on in public were controlled by the wizard hidden behinds the curtain, so it is in QA where all the great quality that the customers see is controlled by the QA professional. If you ignore the “Wizard” you do so at the risk of compromising Quality.

Are you a project lead or perhaps a new or aspiring QA manager? Then this session is for you. This session will not cover the latest QA trend or the current hot automation tool of the day, but rather the perils of ignoring the QA professional behind the curtain. We spend months or even years training a QA engineer only to see them walk out the door because a better opportunity came along. You don’t just lose a person you lose knowledge–knowledge that is sometimes hard or impossible to replace. What can we do about it?

In this session we will explore ideas on how to develop management traits and skills that we perform on a day to day basis to make sure our wizards keeps pulling those levers and tooting those horns for us instead of our competitor. A session about how to be a manager at a QA conference? Well, sometimes it really is all about the people.

Session Takeaways:

  • Ideas on managing or leading a QA team
  • How to treat a human as a person not a resource
  • How to give incentives with limited to no resources
  • How to add value through happy team members
  • How to show your value to upper management
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Session Speaker:

Bradley BairdBradley Baird – Senior Manager Product Quality, Harman International
Bradley Baird has over 21 years’ experience as an SQA professional, he has taught and trained groups all over the US as well as in Australia, Eastern Europe, India, South America, and Taiwan on SQA practices and methodologies. He has a master’s degree in Computer Science and has worked at several large and small software companies where he has created SQA departments test labs from scratch, trained test teams and educated stake holders everywhere on the values of SQA. Currently he is Sr. SQA Manager Product Quality at Harman International.