ER: Presenting at the Sydney Testers meetup (12th April 2023)

The Sydney Testers meetup has been Australia’s largest testing meetup for many years and I was more than happy to help when organizer, Paul Maxwell-Walters, was looking for speakers.

I already had a conference talk “in the can” due to being unable to present at the Melbourne Testing Talks conference in 2022, so my preparation only consisted of some minor updates to the slide deck and a practice run to nail down the slide transitions and timing.

The meetup took place on the evening of 12th April and I would be second up (presenting virtually over Zoom), following Ashley Graf‘s half-hour talk on “50 questions to faster onboarding (as a QA)”. A decent crowd formed during the first 30-45 minutes of the session and I took the virtual stage at just after 6.30pm.

My talk was titled “Lessons Learned in Software Testing” and I shared six lessons I’ve learned during my twenty-odd years in the testing industry. I guess some of my opinions and lessons are a little contrarian, but I’m OK with that as much of what I see presented as consensus around testing (especially on platforms like LinkedIn) doesn’t reflect my lived experience in this industry. If you want to know the six lessons that I shared, you’ll need to watch all 45 minutes of my presentation!

Thanks to Paul for the opportunity to present to the Sydney Testers audience and also for the interesting questions during the Q&A afterwards.

A recording of both talks from this meetup (as well as the Q&A) is available on YouTube (my talk starts at 32 minutes into this recording):