Phil Royston

Tesena

This webinar explores recruiting and finding good software testers. Doing testing well requires having enough people with the right skills and knowledge. Great testers have always needed to be T-shaped people with strong testing skills and an ability to cross over into other IT roles and to understand “the business”. I always stressed that testing needs not only good hard skills, but also soft skills because our work deals with finding and reporting human mistakes. But in the last few years, particularly with the now prevalent adoption of Agile and DevOps, the challenges facing software testers are growing with an increasing need to be able to apply knowledge of system architecture, coding and how to use a number of tools to help them to do their job both quickly and thoroughly. At the same it seems to be getting harder to get sufficient talent into IT as a whole, never mind into software testing.

I feel I have been trying to solve some of these challenges throughout my software testing career, but most especially in the last six years whilst building a software testing business. I would like to share the experiences and lessons I have learned during this period that would have really helped my in my time delivering testing services. They’ll be relevant to you no matter what your role in testing is.

Whilst undergoing the transformation from software tester to businessman, I have gained, through both success and failure, knowledge about brand development, recruitment, human resources, leadership and simply what it takes to build and maintain a happy, functioning team. I hope to introduce you to powerful ideas and tools that can help you motivate more of the right people into your team, spot the people who have what it takes to be good software testers, and support and promote their long-term development to keep their skills and knowledge relevant.

A lot of what I will tell you is based on the most important thing I have learned in my professional and business career, which is the importance of having a growth mindset. To grow as a person a team or a company, you need to be able to face your failures, admit that there are things that you don’t do as well as you could and that there many things that you still have to learn.