Next up in our ‘Meet the Speaker’ Series for UKSTAR 2018 is Ali Hill.

 

Ali Hill has been a software tester for over three and a half years.

Starting off as a games tester, he then moved into a more traditional software testing role at Craneware testing a web application produced for the U.S. healthcare industry.

Ali graduated with a History degree from the University of Edinburgh but has since developed a passion for software development and is interested in all things DevOps, performance testing and automation.

 

Ali will present his session ‘My Journey in Attempting to Become a More Technical Tester‘ at UKSTAR 2018 in London.

 

1. What is your favourite testing book/blog? Why is this your favourite?

Not a testing book, but the book which has helped me the most in my role as a tester has to be the Phoenix Project. It has given me a high level picture of good practices and processes within a technology company. It allowed me to identify improvements which could be made at my current company, most notably in environment monitoring. I cover the actions I took after reading this book in my talk.

 

2. How do you keep up to date with the software testing industry?

Twitter, mainly. I started off by following Ministry of Testing and then saw who they were following/re-tweeting and began to follow a really great group of testers and it snowballed from there. I find the content from the testing community on Twitter extremely valuable. A lot of new ideas are shared, which prompts me to explore these ideas further. I then decide whether it’s something that I think would be worth sharing with my colleagues. It’s easy to forget that a lot of testers don’t use social media for engaging with the testing community, so it’s important that those of us involved in the community share ideas, tools, techniques etc to people in our workplaces.

 

3. What is the biggest misconception about testing that you’ve heard?

I think there is currently an overemphasis on testers needing to be able to write automated test scripts. Not every tester needs to be able to code and if it isn’t something they’re passionate about then by forcing more people to learn to code you may be doing more harm than good. I’ve found that there is more value in being aware of automated test best practices and identifying what types of tests to write and where to test. Testers are more valuable when exploring and experimenting, let’s not limit ourselves to writing an endless number of test scripts.