Lena Nyström
Solving problems one question at a time
Stockholm, Sweden
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Lena has been in the IT-industry since 1999 when she got her first job as a developer. Testing and requirements have always been a part of her job but in 2009 she decided to take the step into testing full-time and she has never looked back since. Lena has worked as a single tester, test lead, test manager, senior test manager and nowadays she is team manager for the QA division at AFA Insurance. She is also involved with the software testing education in Sweden, both as chairman for one of the schools and by mentoring interns to give them the best internship possible.
Lena lives in a big house filled with gaming stuff, books, sewing machines and fabric. Gaming is a big thing for everyone in the family and something she loves talking about. Biggest achievement: the Dance Dance Revolution-machine taking up half of her living room-space.
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Deciphering alerts: Make what your software is saying make sense
If you have used software, you have likely come across messages that made you pause and think “Did a human write this?” Information, errors, warnings and other alerts can be incredibly unhelpful and sometimes even misleading. But why is it so hard to tell us what happened and what we need to correct to do what we want to do? Well, the truth is there are a lot of perspectives to balance and they often clash.
Messages tell a story. A story of choices, of compromise and of the world they live in. They leave a trail of breadcrumbs and following the clues might even show us the way to problems hiding underneath. From the often crisp and immediate messages in frontend validation to the multi-time translated notifications originating from a database or an integrated service, there are lots of hints to pick up on.
In this session we will look into how different parts of the tech stack deal with validations, errors and other types of information to the user, how to guess which part of the stack they are from and how we can use that to do better testing. We will look at examples, look into their strengths and weaknesses and why it is so hard to design the perfect message. The goal is to decide which perspectives to take into consideration and make what your software is saying make sense to people who are not developers.
Delivering fast and slow - Ethics of quality
Daily, we are pushing the boundaries of how fast we can deliver software. Constantly running on a knife’s edge between great success and horrible failure.
Delivering something new, better, faster than our competition can mean incredible payoff and we are constantly being asked to cut costs and deliver more, faster, cheaper. But then suddenly, you fall off the other side of the edge and wake up to 189 dead in a plane crash or having to take down and redesign your entire banking service because the architecture didn’t hold up to the load. It probably wasn’t your decision to push that to production but one can imagine that a long chain of people have to have made a number of small (or huge) decisions that led up to that result.
So, where do we draw the line? Do we let that potential risk slip by even if we know it might potentially cause someone to lose time, money, or even health? What are we, as individuals, responsible for and how much can we hide behind the chain of command?
We will explore the ethics of software development, focusing on quality in general and testing in particular. We will look at what costs the context switching between solving a problem and finding the gaps in the solution will add to software development and why testing is so much more than automation and scripts.
We will look at some interesting bugs and loopholes to discuss what can be learned from them and how to make sure that at the end of the day, we will sleep soundly, knowing we made our choices not because they were easy but because we believe them to be right.
The Jurassic Park Problem - possible, ethical, legal
Technology has the possibility to change everything. Change lives, quality of life or even the direction of mankind.
With the use of technical innovations we are able to communicate not only across the world, but across the stars! We are able to do surgeries and medical replacements that where science fiction only decades ago.
Without pushing the boundaries of the possible - where would we be in this day and age? We can be sure it would definitely not be where we are today.
When building software, we often talk about what is possible from a technical point of view, what a user would want and what would benefit the business. But there are other aspects to consider, that engineering teams might not consider as often. Among them - the ethical and legal aspects and implications of a solution.
In this talk we will discuss how possible, ethical and legal are three different forces - working on different axis and with their own forces. Sometimes in tandem, sometimes in mutual exclusiveness. Often not with enough consideration of all three.
This talk is for anyone who wants to reflect and learn from an experienced lawyer who likes to ask ”Is it legal to build that?”, a lifelong tech person who likes to push the ”Is it possible to build that?”, both with a passion for asking ”But SHOULD we build that?”
Lena Nyström
Solving problems one question at a time
Stockholm, Sweden
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