Alexa Beach
Alexa Beach is a Sr. Quality Assurance Analyst for Sweetwater
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Alexa has over 10+ years of experience in advocating for quality throughout various projects. She is passionate about not only testing functionality, but also testing from the perspective of the end-user. Because of her strong belief that testing should be approached as early in the process as possible, she engages in quality advocacy at every stage of the project, from designing the user interface to uncovering and documenting business requirements. Please don’t throw something over the wall at her.
When she is not working, Alexa enjoys spending time with her family at their lake place or a nearby local winery. If you don’t find her there, she is probably at home snuggled up with her pup and a cup of coffee.
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The Race to the Top… When Do You Stop?
In many QA organizations, career growth is often equated with becoming a people manager. But what happens when your strengths — and passions — lie elsewhere?
In this session, we'll share a tale of two testers, metaphorically climbing QA Everest. Using our experiences and lessons learned to help you navigate the decision, "do I want to manage or do I want to keep testing?"
We'll each share some of our personal journey from QA individual contributor to manager and back again. While you can value the opportunity to lead, you may ultimately realize that the parts of the role that energize you most are mentoring testers, improving quality practices, staying hands-on with testing, and supporting projects through strong organization and communication — not the people-management aspects like performance reviews, HR responsibilities, or navigating formal management structures.
This session challenges the idea that you have to keep climbing the mountain toward higher base camps, including management. Instead, it reframes the individual contributor role as a powerful, intentional career choice that brings deep value to teams. We'll discuss the decision points and key characteristics to help you determine where you want to stop on your journey up QA Everest. Then, we'll outline ways QA individuals can advocate for themselves, define success beyond titles, and continue to grow their influence without managing people.
Whether you’re a tester questioning your next career move, a people manager considering a change, or a leader looking to better support IC career paths, this talk will offer validation, clarity, and practical takeaways.
Shifting our mindset from Quality Assurance to Quality Advocacy
How your role as a QA influences the entire team to produce quality products from discovery to delivery
While assuring quality is a necessary step for project success, true impact can only be achieved through advocating quality. Sure, we can follow the typical QA model and just stop bugs from happening at the end, OR we can advocate for quality at all stages of a project in order to outperform and transform!
Ensuring the quality of a product is difficult to do if you only begin to worry about it at the end of a project, and yet the QA role that is tasked with ensuring quality is traditionally treated as the last stop for development. Instead, it is better for QA to be involved in advocating for the quality of the product from the very first stages. What does quality advocacy look like? How do you implement it and continue to engage with all factors of discovery and development throughout the duration of a project? Finally, what are the benefits of having quality advocacy as opposed to traditional quality assurance? Quality Assurance is a team effort; therefore strong relationships between Quality Assurance Analysts and Developers are vital.
Can I have my hat back?
How to fight the harmful perception that QA is a nicety and not a necessity on a team
Have you ever been on a project where BA’s, PM’s or developers have had to fill the QA role? We have all heard stories of how the QA hat is often donned by team members who do not specialize in testing and quality assurance. Business analysts, project managers, or even developers fill the role of QA due to lack of time or budget, often because there is a misunderstanding of the role of a QA. The results can be disastrous! Let’s understand why and how designated Quality Assurance Analysts are needed on a project, and talk about the specialized lens that they, like all other roles, lend to a project.
Bugs are friends too!
Reshaping the perception that bugs are inherently bad and should be avoided
The ideal of creating bug-free software is a fallacy, but team members often develop unhealthy phobias of a naturally occurring phenomenon. Phobias manifest themselves in various ways, such as denial (that’s not a bug, I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to behave like that), avoidance (we will log that in the backlog and circle back around to it if we have time), or emotional reactions (she is always picking apart my code, doesn’t she understand everything I had to do to get it to this point?). None of these reactions are helpful, and all limit the growth potential that bugs offer a project. Together, we will discuss why ‘bug’ is not a dirty word and find out how bugs can actual help cultivate better team dynamics and produce a better end product.
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