UKSTAR Speakers Laurent Py and Kateryna Shevchenko are next up for the Meet the Speaker series here.

They will be co-presenting a Conversation Track on Quality on Tuesday 28th at 2:oo p.m.

Laurent’s session is ‘Focus on Testing Value First Before Correctness‘ and Kateryna’s session Quality Versus Velocity‘ will be discussed at UKSTAR.

 

How did you get started in software testing?

L: It was 13 years ago. I was product manager and co-founder of a startup. We had no real testing in place at that time. And I remember that day during my summer holidays when our biggest customer, a german company sent me an email saying:

“I real like your product but it’s definitely too buggy. You have to do something. This can prevent us from moving forward with your company“

This email was a real eye-opener for me as bad quality was impacting our emerging business. It was a real threat to our company. This is how I started seriously investing time and energy in testing.

 

K: There was a phone call from my brother, Yevhen, 7 years ago. I remember he said “Hi, we need a tester here. Is this something you are interested in?“.

I had no idea what he meant but replied “yes, sure!”. And my exiting journey into the world of testing began. I remember, on that very first day, I was asked to do some exploratory testing and, actually, found my very first bug! 😀

 

Who inspires you?

L: The first one is Eric Ries who wrote “Lean Startup”. He promotes a test first approach driven by the most critical assumptions. And this can apply to software testing as well as testing business assumptions of a company. It’s all about learning and iterating fast.

The second one is James Bach. He explains very well that testing activities depend on the context and the core mindset should be critical thinking. There are no best practices.

 

K: People around me – my super smart team, family and friends. My team, they always have great and inspirational ideas and challenges they come to me with. And I learn from them a lot! I like to experiment and my team supports me here. In fact, we like to experiment together – changing our ways of working, learning new tools or trying out new approaches. My family and friends are the best supporters too. It is always great to talk about techie stuff over a cup of tea with them 😀

 

What do you see for the future of software testing?

L: When release cycles were longer, functional testing was the king. Now with the rise of DevOps and cloud applications, software testing becomes much more fragmented. Security becomes really strategic as well as UX. We have to test dozens of aspects through this continuous deployment pipeline. And testing in production is equally important. Analyzing how the application and users behave in production is also part of the picture. The feedback loop is really short. That definitely requires more technical skills as well as critical thinking mindset.

 

K: Automation! Its popularity will definitely grow. Especially if we are talking about testing in an Agile environment when we are already focusing on reducing manual testing