Next up in our ‘Meet the Speaker’ Series for UKSTAR 2018 is Joel Montvelisky.

 

Joel started testing by accident as a student job back in the late 90’s and after about 5 years of trying to run away from it he finally realized that he actually like the work and responsibility of a Tester.

Joel has been able to work in small and larger organizations, from tiny Internet Startups and all the way to Global Enterprises such as Mercury Interactive (back in the day). During his professional journey he’s been a tester, test manager, qa director, consultant, trainer, speaker and more. Joel has been lucky enough to speak at conferences such as Star East, CAST, QA&Test, and in a number of meetups throughout Europe.

Today in PractiTest he manages all the aspects of Quality for the Company, and as Solution Architect he also works with PractiTest customers to understand their needs and create a better product. In the last number of years Joel has been working on giving back to the community with a number of projects such as the State of Testing Report– (running for 4 years now) together with TeaTime with Testers, and his latest project, the OnlineTestConf – that already ran 2 editions and is starting to plan the third one for this fall.

 

Joel will present his as part of a conversation track with Simon Prior. Joel will present his session ‘Daring to provide more value than simply testing’ at UKSTAR 2018 in London.

 

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

I have a number of favourite books on testing, hard to choose only one.

I really enjoyed Agile Testing by Crispin and Gregory, used it extensively while working with Agile Dev Team Leaders and it was always great! I think this book was the first time someone explained in a clear way how Agile and Testing fit together in a natural and logical way.

There are many more but I will mention 2 of them – Perfect Software and Other Illusions about Testing by Gerry Weinberg, and a more recent one – The Digital Quality Handbook by Eran Kinsbruner.

 

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

I think that today is easier than ever to keep up.

There are some amazing podcasts that I listen to on my commute to and from work that have very good and updated information.  There is also the incredibly active community in twitter that keeps bringing up comments and articles that display all the latest in news, trends, methodologies, discussions and tools around the community.

I also try to attend and speak in at least a couple of conferences each year, and this provides an intensive dose of updates in only a couple of days.  And also the fact that I blog actively and have periodic Webinars, basically forces me to research different topics around the testing world, and for this Google is the researcher’s best friend.

Finally, as I am PractiTest’s Chief Solution Architect, that means that a big part of my work is visiting and talking to our customers around the world.  This allows me to see first hand how hundreds of organizations and thousands of testers are working in the actual testing tasks.  Many times it is from these visits that I learn about a new tool or an interesting testing approach that I had not heard of before, and from there on I can go ahead and investigate it on my own.

 

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

There are plenty of misconceptions.

There is the one that says that a bug that was released is the fault of the testing team for not finding it.  There is also the misconception that in order to advance in testing you need to choose between becoming a manager or specialising in scripting and automation.  And many more.

But the one I have been hearing lately that drives me nuts is the one where many people in the Industry (Testers, and Non-Testers) believe that with the evolution of Agile, Iterative and Adaptive development practices the job of the tester will become redundant and unnecessary.

I totally agree that testing is shifting and morphing, what we are doing now is light-years away from what I started doing back in the 90’s before the Y2K bug (for those dinosaurs around us).  But I believe that the role of the testers, and specially the perspective we bring to the mix of the software development process is incredibly singular and important, and it will take many many years for AI technologies or programmers writing automated scripts to replace this value and the contribution we have in the process.

It is a fact that the profile and the role of the tester are shifting, but a misconception that our days are numbered (at least in the low number of years).