On the 21st of April 2020, the fully independent, punk, Leeds Testing Atelier returns at the amazing Wharf Chambers for a day of learning, collaboration and laughs!

Check out our amazing speakers! This is gonna be great!
Yong Yuen He

Yong Yuen He

I am a Senior Test Engineer at Booking.com's Transport at Manchester division. I am passionate about Agile and Ways of Working which is my strength as a non-technical tester. I am a Chinese born Finnish citizen who has lived in Manchester for 10 years and don't consider myself settled: I am always looking to travel and learn more which also reflects in my eagerness to develop myself in the Tech world.

Testing Through The Mist of the Twilight Zone

A case study of how changing my team's ways of working on the physical board reshaped how we refined, planned and progressed with our development and embedded all team members and their views throughout the journey.By using the 'Twilight Zone' style of mind mapping our concerns, thoughts and plans into our physical board and removing columns (To DO, DEV, TEST etc) our delivery and quality improved and elements of development were taken out of silos and helped all team members be on the same level. It gave a strong push to test advocacy because the development cycle was seen as something that was considered in every step, not as the last step.

Joe Stead

Joe Stead

Joe is currently working on software that is designed to scale to millions of users concurrently, and he has been for the past 5 years. Prior to that, he spent some time working on security-conscious systems. His current focus is on improving the delivery of effective and usable software.

Building Deterministic Infrastructure That Works

In the beginning, we had VMWare, change requests, different environments with different setups, and a lot of headaches! It was impossible to know what the desired state of any environment was. Then, we had cloud providers, who gave us fancy portals where we could provision our resources on the fly much quicker. Yet we still had to build each environment by hand, which is incredibly error-prone. Still we had no real way of knowing what the desired state of a system was, let alone if it was in that state! Now, we have Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Finally a way of defining our infrastructure that is deterministic! Every environment can be the same. We have a source of truth. Change requests are now Pull Requests. This is great, but it doesn’t guarantee that anything works. We’ll explore how to not only test your infrastructure, but also what you should be testing and where the value really is. Is your Infrastructure as Code really the source of truth? Are your assumptions about an implementation detail of your cloud provider actually correct? Most importantly, does your system actually work on the defined infrastructure?

Rosie Hamilton

Rosie Hamilton

Rosie is a Software Developer at ThingCo, an insurtech company that builds next generation telematics platforms for smart devices in vehicles. Her career began in software testing and switched to software development when she started building web apps and APIs. She holds a Professional Certificate in Computer Science and Mobile Applications from HarvardX and works across the full stack (JavaScript React Native apps, API and services built inside Go Serverless Lambdas). She enjoys pairing, working collaboratively and helping others learn. Rosie also helps encourages diversity in the tech community through public speaking and engagement with minority groups.

Testing with Go!

Anyone writing code should also be writing tests along side that code. I will demonstrate how to get started doing this in the programming language Go. From beginner to advanced, hopefully this talk will have something in it for everyone. Starting at the simplest possible example, ('Hello Atelier') and assuming no prior coding knowledge, we will gradually build upon examples and start introducing more advanced concepts. I will use Visual Studio Code to write code and tests live(!). Showing how Test Driven Development is done and demonstrating my favourite tool for doing red, green refactoring in Go. All code and test examples written during this talk will be committed to a public GitHub repository and made available at the end of the talk. This is the talk is for you if...

Christopher Chant

Christopher Chant

Christopher Chant is a determined and passionate test professional with experience across multiple domains. He has learned to embrace all parts of the development lifecycle as learning opportunities: working in business analysis, development, testing and coaching roles in an attempt to help teams grow and deliver. When not testing, Christopher spends his time running (not often enough), traveling all over the country to watch Nottingham Forest F.C. lose (occasionally they win), jealously looking at other people's dogs and playing board games.

Data Rising

The importance and power of Machine Learning and AI is starting to be explored by more and more software companies. As tester's, where do we fit in, and how do we approach these projects? I recently took on the role of Head of Testing at a data science company, and I've begun my adventure in this exciting space. My task is to establish a test team capable of working on big data/data science projects. I was honest before I was offered the role, reiterating that I don't have any experience in data science! I was reassuringly told, don't worry, we're all figuring this out, come along on the journey. I've covered a lot of ground in the short space of time, and I'm drawing the map as I go, and while I still haven't got my bearings, I know where we are and where we are heading. Join me as I share how I used existing skills to get me started, and what I've learned to add value in a domain I found intimidating. I'll show you my map and point out some of the exciting landmarks along the journey.

Beth Marshall

Beth Marshall

I am a tester with over 10 years experience, working for BJSS, QA and Cocoon amongst others. My new years res was to try my hand at public speaking in 2019, and have been after attending the test atelier for ages - a lightening talk spot would be amazing!

The average tester: how to get and keep a job when you’re not a rockstar

I would describe myself as a bog standard tester, in a good way. I don’t have much coding knowledge, I haven’t written a book or done anything spectacular, and I spend my time outside of work mostly on raising my family - but this hasn’t stopped me from carving out a career in testing from scratch, keeping getting hired, re-hired and ex-bosses moving somewhere and hiring me again. I am not exceptional, but, critically, I am also not a dick. I’m often intimidated by the feats of speakers, so I’d love attendees like me to go away knowing there’s longevity to just being good at your job and being good to work with.We shouldn’t pooh pooh the fact that some people work to pay the bills, and I’d love to encourage those people to believe in themselves more and know a long term career is achievable without attaining guru status.

John McGee

John McGee

Have been involved in testing for around 25 years so I have seen a lot of changes in that time, I can vaguely remember the days when we used to run pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages (you get my drift) of scripts manually. I love exploring both software and the world around me, love helping other testers learn and grow, setup inhouse online test events where testers from around my business share knowledge, experience and thoughts around testing, have previously spoke at Agile Test Northeast and Briefly at MOT north east winning the best presentation award at the first lightning talk event there.

What are you looking at? – Modern Art and Testing in the Blink of an Eye!

I'll take you through an overview of modern art and show you how it compares to testing. We'll talk about perspectives, how techniques in art and the testing world are the same, how bias impacts art and testing, introducing randomness...and repetition. I'll talk about how artists use models, tools, and heuristics in the same way that testers do. We’ll look at how we both break the rules and attempt to tear-down society! How testers and artists use questioning techniques, how we both simplify complex thoughts, consider stakeholders in the art and development world, the use of the familiar as an oracle, how to overcome fears and obstacles. I’ll thrown in a few Manifestos. We'll talk about staying focused, defocusing techniques in artworks and when testing, how artists kept you rooted into reality in truly abstract paintings and how we need to stay rooted to the reality of our missions while testing. I’ll tell you how artists told stories and presented images to their audience and how we need to do the same. I’ll blow your mind with Malevich’s black square (possibly ruining your sleep for days!) and then I’ll tell you how the FBI use art to improve agents observational, conversational and descriptive skills. As you can see there's a massive amount we can learn from the world of art and use in our roles as testers, in addition I'll blow your mind with Malevich's Black Square, give you a team building exercise you can use, make you think about testing in a new (and I believe completely unique) way and give you the confidence and belief to face any challenges. In addition to the comparisons and lessons for testers you will also learn: not all conceptual art is bollocks; Picasso is king (but Cézanne is better); Pollock is no drip; how a urinal changed the course of art and why your 5-year-old really couldn't do it. You'll also be able to blag your way through any gallery like an expert, your visits to the National Gallery or the Tate will never be the same. I'll even throw in Mulder and Scully and the X-Files for free.

Andy Burgin

Andy Burgin

Andy is Lead Platform Engineer at Sky Betting and Gaming. He considers himself a Kubernetes and Hadoop fettler, spending a far too much of his spare time making Raspberry Pis do things they shouldn’t. He is a small part of the organising team for DevOpsDays London confernence and has been runing the Devops meetup in Leeds for 7 years hosting over 50 events. He's attended and spoke at a bunch of DevOps conferences and in his words is 'an all round DevOps nuisance'.

Beyond Dashboards - Visualising Complex Systems

It's common practice to collect a multitude of metrics from our builds, tests, releases and running applications. Typically we use dashboard tools to visualise these metrics creating a plethora of interrelated graphs and charts to enable us to quickly review performance, spot anomalies and monitor the health of our system components. Although we may have detailed knowledge of individual components of the system, can dashboards alone give us the ability to understand how those components and the many others relate, interact and operate as a complex system? Based on the analysis of Kubernetes clusters this session will demonstrate ways to "see" the workloads running on clusters. Helping to better understand a system through visualisation, anomaly identification and exploratory analysis. Using tools such as graph databases and visualisation tools, you'll see how they can help explore and understand cluster workloads. Sharing examples of how these tools have identified issues and how they can help engage with users of the systems to share best practices and ultimately improve cluster performance. By the end of the session, you'll understand how to apply the same tools and techniques to analyse and understand your own systems.

Gabbi Trotter

Gabbi Trotter

Gabbi is a Software Testing recruiter at Searchability. She has 4 years' experience recruiting Testers for companies such as BJSS, Sky, InfinityWorks, AJ Bell, Jaguar Land Rover, and many more, across Yorkshire and the North West. Gabbi focuses on Digital recruitment, and has been committed to building a online network of clients and candidates since day one. Gone are the days of cold calling and job boards, recruitment is now all about who you know, your personal brand, and your social network

How to build your personal brand

We all know it's a candidate driven market so why would you bother curating a personal brand? Maybe your new to the industry and keep missing out to more experienced candidates, or maybe your going for a Senior role and the competition is really tough! A personal brand can take on many forms, in this workshop I will be covering topics such as- How to identify your personal brand, how to use social media in your job hunt, and an introduction to building a online network.

Adam Griffiths

Adam Griffiths

Adam is a Product Development Manager at TransUnion UK in Leeds. With ten years of professional development experience and has led both collocated and distributed teams with members from different cultures, timezones, and countries. When not working Adam shares his man-cave with Space Marines, Chaos Deamons, and occasionally his cat Nala.

Advanced Unit Testing

Unit Tests are easy... if the code you're testing is designed for it. But this is the real world and things are rarely so straight forward. In this session I'll show you some NUnit tips and tricks I've picked up and show you how you can write tests in far less than perfect scenarios...