I don’t generally write monthly reviews, but this time I wanted to share about four events from November so I thought of capturing everything in one place. This post is more of a personal journal to look back on later. Normally, I share updates about the events I attend or speak through LinkedIn, but I thought it would be a good to compile everything into a blog.
1. Final Internal Quality Community Event
On November 13th, I hosted the final internal quality community event of the year at my company. Our guest speaker was Jakub Cagiel, who delivered an insightful talk on Quality at Atlassian. Jakub shared Atlassian's approach to quality and their journey to achieve it, focusing on processes that empower developers to own and build quality effectively. Highly recommend this talk, Jakub was an absolutely fantastic speaker.
This was the sixth event I organized this year as part of our internal quality community at CFC. Here’s a recap of the other incredible sessions. I'm so grateful to all the speakers who agreed to speak.
- Parveen Khan (me!) on Exploratory Testing
- Lewis Prescott on Contract Testing
- Lisi Hocke on Team Transformation Tactics for Holistic Testing and Quality
- Bas Dijkstra on API Security Testing
- Rahul Parwal on Prompt Engineering for Engineers
I enjoyed hosting these events and am very grateful to my colleagues who attended that kept me motivated to continue organizing these sessions. I look forward to continuing these events next year as part of our internal quality community
2. Women in Silicon Roundabout
On November 28th, I attended and spoke at the Women in Silicon Roundabout London conference for the first time. My session, on “Elevate Your Career Through the Power of Networking and Personal Branding,” shared my journey into public speaking and how mentors like Angie Jones and Maaret Pyhäjärvi helped me in my speaking journey. I talked about how I initially had no awareness of testing communities and had never attended a conference. Now, I am involved in several communities and have the opportunity to speak at conferences. I shared about TestBash Brighton 2019 being my first conference and the first community I was introduced to.
In today’s world where layoffs, redundancies and uncertainty, personal branding and networking have more relevant than ever. Watch these short video clips by Kelsey Hightower on how everyone has a personal brand and Angies Jones on networking
I shared actionable tips and stories about how these skills can open new doors, help you stand out, and elevate your career.
The audience engagement was excellent, with a full house of 340 participants attending the session. I’m always happy to present this talk at meetups, conferences, or internal events. If you’d like me to present this session to your organization or event, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.
3. Ministry of Testing Panel
It was an honour to join Jitesh Gosai and Barry Ehigiator as a panellist on The Testing Planet’s discussion on why shifting left isn’t enough hosted by Gwen Diagram. We kicked started by answering the first question
What are the limitations of shift-left testing?
For me, when we talk about shifting testing to the left, it often leads to the misinterpretation that it's solely about automating early or starting testing sooner. This perspective can miss the importance of a shift-right approach or a more holistic view.
It was an engaging conversation where we explored the challenges of shift-left testing, balancing speed with quality, and identifying gaps in current testing practices. Have a read at this post by Jitesh who has written a detailed summary on the testing planet event here
If you missed it, don’t worry, Testing Planet sessions are available on-demand. Thanks to Ministry of Testing for organising this.
4. The Test Tribe London Meetup
On November 29th, I hosted the second Test Tribe London Meetup. Even though we were a smaller group of 16 people, it was a wonderful evening of meaningful interactions and learning. The first one was hosted on 25th September where Simon Prior gave a talk on "Testing SaaS - Quality in a "Buy not Build" World".
The Test Tribe community is organizing events in various cities, and when they reached me to help host a meetup in London, I agreed to it. I had never hosted any external events like this before, so I wanted to contribute to the community in a new way. It was an exciting opportunity to be involved being on the other side. We had two amazing speakers for the second meetup:
- Afsal Backer on Hybrid Load Testing
- Lewis Prescott on Contract Testing in Action
Lewis even gave away a signed copy of his book to a participant who asked a great question during the Q&A! Lots of discussions over pizza and networking. There will be more meetups by The Test Tribe London Meetup in 2025, so keep an eye out for that.
November was a month of events, from organizing internal events to speaking at conferences and hosting meetups, it was a month filled with opportunities to learn, share, grow, contribute and give back to the community. Apart from these events, I got an opportunity to contribute to Anne-Marie Charret's November Newsletter on Quality Coach Book on the topic of "Building Cross-Functional expertise in a team".
If you attended any of these events or found the topics interesting, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
