Working Ourselves Out of a Job: A Passion for Improvement

Isabel Evans

What is the purpose of a tester? Are we really needed? Should we be needed?
If everything went well, if no-one made mistakes, if nothing needed improving, then testing and testers would not be needed. We only need testers because people make mistakes. What if we concentrated on preventing the mistakes instead of finding them after they have been made?

In this presentation, Isabel suggests that current testers should be passionate about undertaking activities that improve the whole of IT; we will know our job is done when we are no longer needed. A passion for improvement should mean we work ourselves out of our current testing roles and provide us the chance to leap to a new level in a professional, consultative and advisory role.

In this talk Isabel Evans discusses the need to:

  • Focus on improving the service to the customer, not on improving testing
  • Focus on enabling others to improve, not on increasing the need for our involvement
  • Focus our passion on the big picture while helping others to focus on the details

Find more software testing resources by Isabel Evans.

About Me!

Isabel has nearly thirty years of experience in the IT industry, mainly in quality management and testing in the financial, communications, and software sectors. Her areas of expertise are software quality management, software testing, teamwork, and training. Since the mid-1980s, her quality management work has focused on encouraging IT teams and customers to work together, delivering results via flexible, customer-focused, risk- and test-driven processes designed and tailored by the teams that will use them.

Her work for the BCS SIGiST Standards Working Party focused on quality attributes, especially usability.

Isabel is a popular speaker at software quality conferences worldwide and has been a member of several working groups for industry improvement. Her publications include the book “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”.

Isabel is a Chartered IT Professional and a Fellow of the British Computer Society.


See more



Similar Categories