“There is a mismatch between what testers do and what skills are offered and taught to them. Using an exemplary ‘day in the life of a tester’ as an illustration, Paul identifies some of varied activities and therefore skills required to be a tester.

Organisations used to slower rates of change are adopting new approaches of Agile, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery to achieve more rapid rates of systems change. But companies are finding the transition from enterprise software development to agile approaches requires more than a process change. The role of testing and testers are poorly defined particularly where companies are attempting to shift testing activities to the left and implement pervasive automation.

In this talk, Paul talks about the problems faced by less-agile organisations who are trying to implement agile software practices and identify three areas of transformation that are key to successful delivery:

• The transition from linear to event-driven processes of software delivery
• Understanding how to trust test automation to do what humans used to
• The new skills profile of test and assurance professionals and those who test.