Next up in our ‘Meet the Speaker’ Series for UKSTAR 2018 is Simon Prior.

 

Simon is a QA Manager at McAfee, leading the Production Operations QA team in Aylesbury and the Web Security Team in Cork.

Simon has worked in various Software Engineering roles since he joined as a graduate 10 years ago. He loves helping people make strides into their careers in QA and of course, loves networking regularly at testing events. Simon is also a Dad, Husband and Wannabe Runner.

 

Simon will present as part of a conversation session at UKSTAR 2018 in London. Simon will present his session ‘If the Universities Won’t Help Us, How Do We #MakeATester?’

 

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

My favourite book which I keep referring back to regularly is “Effective Software Testing” by Elfriede Dustin.

It lists 50 ways to improve testing and I constantly find that problems my team are facing can be related back to items in the list of 50.

As far as Blogs, I regularly read blogs from various Testing minds, but can’t say I have a favourite as it may change each day depending on who’s blog I’ve read. 😀

 

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

I am part of the Ministry of Testing “Testers Chat” Slack channel which I follow discussions regularly on there, I try to read at least a blog every day and share this with my team.

I follow a heap of testers and QA professionals on Twitter and I run a local Testers Meetup group so I try to ensure we get a varied amount of speakers who can bring new insights to the table

 

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

There are several misconceptions which still grate me as I hear them regularly:

• QA are responsible for quality – Erm no, that’s everyone’s responsibility
• QA just write test cases and find defects – I would much prefer we help design the software correctly with quality and testability baked in meaning no defects were found
• We can’t release until QA say so – We can help provide the data for the decisions to be made, but should by no means be the sole decision maker.