401 :  Developing a Professional Testing Culture
Tuesday, 3:45pm - 5:00pm

 
Track: Leadership Perspectives for Testers

Culture happens. If you work with other testers, voila! You do so in a testing culture. But are you aware of it? Has it been shaped consciously? You may consider yourself a professional tester, but how is that attitude shared by your coworkers? How is it supported by your organization? And if you don’t like your answers to these questions, how would you change things?

In this talk, Greg will describe some of the key struggles, events, decisions and people who have shaped the testing culture at Progressive. What are their attitudes about testing, and how do they influence their work? How did they come to have these attitudes, and what were they before? Why did they change? How well are they supported? Greg will address these topics, and more, including the corresponding perspectives of several other participants in their culture

Greg McNelly

Test Engineer, Progressive Insurance

Greg McNelly is currently an in-house software testing consultant at Progressive in Cleveland, Ohio. He advises management on the testing-related aspects of enterprise-level IT initiatives, he coaches testers and test leads, and he supports teams faced with critical, challenging testing problems. Greg is a programmer turned tester, with roughly20  years of experience developing programs that have helped people insure automobiles, predict laboratory test results, precision-align machinery, process payrolls, practice math facts and, of course, test software. Consequently, his work in the field of software testing began around 2003 as a fascination with test automation, the hazards of which led him to a profound respect for the cognitive challenges of software testing, and for those who do it well.