This blog will cover my journey being a women in tech; how I started in testing and how I’ve been inspired !
It was presented during Ministry of Testing Athens Meetup and the recording is available here.
My background and experience being a Women in Tech
Being an engineer was my dream since childhood !
With computer science background, I started my first job as tester from scratch in 2015. I followed in different fields and I discovered many interesting learning opportunities in my journey ! Checkout the whole story about the starting of my career via Ministry of Testing Athens Meetup “Women In Testing”
What make my Journey Special ?
Let’s now talk about particular things in my career that I made in my personal time that are also related to testing.
In the beginning of 2019, I started building a testing community in my city sfax in collaboration with ministry of testing to be the first MOT meetup in Africa. Being motivated by risk storming as a very nice game that you can run to learn and play at the same time. I decided to look for new ways to run meetups such as looking for more games in testing that engage all participants to be proactive, not always listening to presentation. I tried also lean coffee format. They really enjoyed those events and the community is growing ..
Another achievement in the second quarter of the year, I was accepted in many agile and testing conferences in 5 different countries speaking about building communities of practice in the organization and its importance combined between french and english talks.
I consider that last year was the most successful year in my career where I became speaker at international conferences although I had less than 4 years experience in the tech industry.
This year, I had an new kind of challenge. It was to create a blog about my testing activities and my adventures Thanks to lockdown, the blog is getting bigger now.
Another thing that comes just with a discussion with Ard Kramer, we were talking about the 4 C for testers that are considered as the 21st century skills, we decided to write a book with stories from testers how they are applying those skills in their journey and how they think about the future of those skills in order to inspire other testers.
My advice to young women in the Testing Industry
If you’d like to choose testing as a career, I have some advice for you
I’ll start with general one that can be adapted to any new thing that you want to learn in just 20 hours you can watch the TED talk of JOSH Kaufman
The first 20 hours — how to learn anything
Checkout my previous article: Accelerate your learning: How to learn anything new?
More recommendations that I wish I discovered earlier in my career.
- Create a twitter account, follow testers from the global testing community and check what they are sharing.
- There are lots of interesting blogs about testing that could not only inspire you but also you will learn many new things from there.
- Build your network (checkout sam’s video about it); connect with the testers via linkedin as well, follow testing hashtags to get more testing news in your social media
- Read books about testing, there are lots of interesting books.
- Checkout the blog by heather: 30 Things Every New Software Tester Should Learn with all recommendations on what you read, attend, test, and other required skills such as starting with automation, agile testing, and many other things.
- Try to find a link between your hobbies and your career to make it more funny, in my case being a speaker it’s outside my comfort zone but I love it and I want to keep this challenge because I deeply love traveling and attending events so why not international events in testing. It’s really amazing when it comes to learning combined with all the joy of travelling and meeting testers from all the globe.
- Attend conferences, meetups, join communities near you or even create yours.
My female roles that I appreciate in the industry
There are a lot of successful women that you can find very active on twitter
Such as lisa crispin, elisabeth hoocke, angie jones and many others that I discover from day to another and they did amazing things for the global testing community ….
Thank you again for this opportunity, hope you will find those advice useful. Wish you all the best in your career !
Appreciation !!!
Thank you Petros for organizing this awsome #womenintesting meetup ! Glad to be part of it, it was also nice hearing lots of inspiring stories from Gwen, Ileana, Fotini, Maja and Marietta and how they started in testing
Emna Ayadi 