Next up in our ‘Meet the Speaker’ Series for UKSTAR 2018 is Chris Clements.
Chris has been a tester for more than 19 years in various roles from the junior tester who was good at making the tea, right through to Director of QA and everything in between. That has entailed automation and hands-on exploratory testing. The roles have been varied but he has been a failover tester, UI tester, API tester, performance tester, backend tester, front-end tester, sideways, trapdoor tester and everything in between ☺.
In addition, he has set up cultures within test teams to embrace innovation and challenging yourself more. He has enlightened the local testers and wannabe testers through the Northern Ireland Testers MeetUp scene (of which he is a co-founder and co-organizer) and university scene, to the joys and pitfalls of testing and the testing culture.
Chris is currently a QA & Delivery Lead within PwC within the Digital space and was was recently the Head of Testing for Bitnet and was responsible for the testing approach to Blockchain functionality. In addition, he previously spoke at the ASTQB Conference in San Francisco 2014 on the challenges of testing within an agile environment.
Chris will present his session ‘A Tester’s Journey: Back to our Roots‘ at UKSTAR 2018 in London.
1. What is your favourite testing book/blog? Why is this your favourite?
My favourite book actually not a testing book at all, yet has so much relevance to testing and why we test things. It is Simon Sinek and his book ‘Start with why‘. Regards blogs, I generally read many and don’t have favourites, I take all my blog and articles from people I follow on Twitter. I love reading and listening to people like Lisa Bodell, Sir Ken Robinson and Charlie Kim.
I’m not a huge fan of the perceived prominent voices in the testing world on social media, who seem to think shouting louder makes them right ☺
2. How do you keep up to date with the software testing industry?
Generally through 2 mediums.
Twitter of which I follow a wide range of testing enthusiasts and our local meet up here in Northern Ireland of which I’m an active contributor. You can read all you want but we try and make our meetups hands-on and do some testing, that’s the best way to hone your skillsets and learn off others through seeing and doing.
3. What is the biggest misconception about testing that you’ve heard?
A number. Including how a tester is a failed developer, how testers like to break things (really annoys me in interviews). My 2 favourite (if you can call them that) misconceptions are that automation is testing which is just a tired and dated notion and testers will be replaced by machines (how can you replace thinking, ideas and user actions and interactions is beyond me)