On the 13th of May 2025, the fully independent, punk, Leeds Testing Atelier returns at The Tetley for a day of learning, collaboration and laughs!

Check out our awesome speakers!
Lauren Borodajko

Lauren Borodajko

I live in West Yorkshire and have been working as an Engineering Manager with my background being in Quality Coaching. I love putting people first, and that is exactly why I stated The Organic Edge Newsletter and started to document Organic Quality. My approach has helped scale engineering teams across the globe ranging from unicorn start-ups to FTSE 250 companies. I have always been curious about how the world works and I am a passionate supporter of changing the narrative around dyslexia.

Organic Quality, it starts with the soil

Throughout my career from Tester and Quality Coach to Engineering Manager. I have relied on an approach Organic Quality. This philosophy has consistently helped the teams I work with mature and achieve high performance fast. At its core, Organic Quality is built upon three key values: kindness, curiosity, and credibility. By embracing these values, individuals and teams can create an environment where success feels effortless and work becomes something to genuinely enjoy. Sounds easy right? We all know that when people are involved, things are never easy! In this talk I will walk through the four pillars of Organic Quality: Conscious Awareness, Open Communication, Social Responsibility & Empowered Leadership. There will be real life stories of our learnings and actionable examples of how everyone can be a little more organic at work.

Andy Burgin

Andy Burgin

Andy is by day a Principal Platform Engineer at a gambling firm, by night an opensource AI contributor working with LLMs and AI applications running in Kubernetes. Currently working with K8sGPT to help analyse and diagnose faults on Kubernetes clusters. He also is a small part of the organizing team for DevOpsDays London and ran the DevOps meetup in Leeds for almost a decade hosting over 50 events. He’s attended and has spoken at a bunch of DevOps conferences and in his own words is "an all-round DevOps nuisance".

AI Agents - Lets Talk...

Let's talk about the latest hot topic in our industry - AI Agents. They might be coming for your job, entire workforces may be replaced by these super-smart chunks of code, so what does it mean for you? We'll also see one in action.

Emily O'Connor

Emily O'Connor

Emily O'Connor is a Principal Test Engineer at Audacia, a consultancy that work across a variety of industries. Given each consultant cannot be an expert in each of them - Emily uses this to her advantage by identifying edge cases and test scenarios by recognising the fact that she is not often the companies typical users.

Testing your assumptions - You are not your customer

This talk goes over some of the assumptions development teams can make and how recognising them can help teams build better quality products - because you are not your customer.

Stephen Platten

Stephen Platten

Stephen is an award winning (European Software Testing awards, TESTA) tester and QA, with a passion for test improvement and development. I have worked in most aspects of electronic engineering/software engineering. He has a passion for testing and understanding complex applications, technologies, and projects. To quote him, "I want to be the best manager, tester, and coach I can be, to be "The Stoic Tester"

Stoicism & Software Testing: Ancient Philosophy Meets Modern Methods

Testing is often chaos, uncertainty, changing requirements, constant defects, and a challenging stakeholder. What is the answer to this chaos? A 2000-year-old philosophy?? Stephen's talk will about Stoicism and how it's principles can be used to gain a different perspective on this chaos to make us happier testers.

Sorrel Harriet

Sorrel Harriet

Having bounced around academia and the tech industry in various roles, Sorrel now works part-time as a research software engineer at Leeds University and part-time as a freelance learning coach and consultant to engineering teams. Much of what we do as engineers hinges on our capacity to learn, independently and collaboratively, yet learning to learn isn't a prominent feature of most curriculums. That's why she started her consultancy, where she can bring her research and teacher experience to support continuous learning.

Testing in the dark: Life as a research software engineer

This short talk will give the audience an insight into the chaotic underworld that is research software engineering. It aims to ignite inter-contextual learning in areas like software design, testing, and supporting neurodiversity in teams. If you've ever been curious about engineering in an academic research context, this one's for you!