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 Conference Speakers |
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| Exploring Testing Leadership |
Michael Bolton, Founder
DevelopSense |
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"Leadership is the process of creating an environment in which everyone is empowered."
Gerald M. Weinberg, Becoming a Technical Leader
Leaders require freedom and responsibility to optimize the quality of their work, while granting freedom and responsibility to others to do the same. A leader can't perform a complex task such as organizing a team of skilled technical people by following a script. A leader must respond, flexibly and adaptably, to whatever complications the situation presents. A leader must learn rapidly and observe keenly. A leader must have access to a large number of models, applying them to absorb, process, and respond to whatever information is available. In Weinberg's model, a leader must motivate, organize, and innovate. These skills are fundamentally exploratory--and are exactly those required for excellent testing.
Testing on its own doesn't assure quality--leadership does that--but testing does make informed decisions about quality possible. In this presentation, Michael Bolton will discuss the strong connections between leadership and the exploratory mindset, showing the benefits leaders can obtain from the same skills associated with excellent testing. By the same token, he'll show how testers with strong leadership skills contribute to the project by cycles of exploration, discovery, investigation, and learning. |
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| Meet Michael Bolton |
Michael Bolton is a tester, consultant, and testing trainer and a leader in the context-driven software testing movement. He has over 20 years of experience in the computer industry testing, developing, managing, and writing about software. Currently, he leads DevelopSense, a Toronto-based consultancy. Prior to that, he was with Quarterdeck Corporation for eight years, during which he delivered the company’s flagship products and directed project and testing teams both in-house and around the world.
Michael has been teaching software testing on five continents for seven years. He is the co-author (with senior author James Bach) of Rapid Software Testing, a course that presents a methodology and mindset for testing software expertly in uncertain conditions and under extreme time pressure. Michael has been an invited participant in the Workshops on Teaching Software Testing since 2003, and was a member of the first Exploratory Testing Research Summit in 2006. He is co-founder (with Fiona Charles) of the Toronto Workshops on Software Testing. He has been program chair for the Conference for the Association for Software Testing and for the Toronto Association of System and Software Quality. He has a column in Better Software Magazine, is a highly-regarded speaker at conferences world-wide, and very sporadically produces his own newsletter.
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