Anita Squires
Automated Tester at CGI
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
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Anita has always been interested in computers from an early age; very early on, her dad gifted her a ZX spectrum. However, it took until she was later in her career to actually move directly into a coding career by becoming an automated tester. Before that, she spent many years working in a support role in various financial technology institutes, working closely with analysts, developers and testers, noticing the lack of young women in the space.
Outside of her day job, she has focused on trying to encourage more young women into technology roles with the Dell Stem Apire Mentoring program.
Area of Expertise
Topics
The Consultant’s Guide to Exploratory Testing in Data Apps
Exploratory testing is sometimes seen as something you “just do”—but when you’re working in high-stakes environments like government or enterprise data platforms, it becomes something you need to do well, do fast, and explain clearly.
In this talk, I’ll share how I approach exploratory testing in data-heavy systems like Power BI and Microsoft Fabric. I’ll talk about what makes these systems different, how you uncover meaningful risks without a full spec, and how being a consultant shapes the way we explore and report.
This isn’t a checklist of generic heuristics. It’s about real-world navigation—where the dashboards don’t match the database, the requirements change mid-sprint, and the “what does good look like?” question has 3 different answers.
Expect war stories, simple visuals, and clear techniques that balance curiosity, coverage, and context. If you’ve ever wondered how to make exploratory testing more structured without making it boring, this is for you.
Agile and the Tester: Roles, Rituals, and Real Tensions
Agile is supposed to be collaborative—but for many testers, being “in the sprint” still feels like being at the edge of the conversation. Tasks arrive late. Quality is a checkbox. And when things go wrong, testers are expected to clean it up, not shape it early.
This talk is a real-world look at the ways testers can become essential, embedded members of Agile teams, and what happens when they aren’t. I’ll share the tensions I’ve seen between roles, rituals, and expectations—and how small changes in process and mindset helped shift things.
We’ll talk about:
Why testers often feel left out of planning (and what to do about it)
The sprint anti-patterns that quietly waste everyone’s time
How to build trust and influence without having “final say”
This talk is for anyone who’s ever wondered if Agile could really work for testers—and wants practical, grounded ways to make it better for the whole team.
Hidden voices/lost ideas
If you ask most people to name a famous person associated with the internet, they will probably say Tim Berners-Lee. He did create the World Wide Web, but without the work of Radia Perlman, Elizabeth Fienler and Karen Spark-Jones, it would not be half as useful to the everyday person. Let my talk introduce you to 10 women who helped shape the technology we use today and explain why not forgetting them can help us find more hidden voices in our day-to-day lives and use their ideas to move us forward.
For the past forty years, fewer women have enrolled in technology courses. Several articles pinpoint 1984 as the year that enrolment dropped off in a steep decline. There were several factors to this drop off, including just a general view that women did not belong in the field, with Steven Levy labelling them “horribly inefficient and wasteful things” in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.
Automated Testing for Fabric: What Works and What Doesn’t
Microsoft Fabric provides a powerful suite of tools for analytics and data engineering; however, when it comes to testing, most teams are still figuring it out as they go.
In this talk, I’ll share lessons learned from working on a government transformation project where Fabric, Power BI, and automation came together in messy, surprising, and occasionally brilliant ways.
I’ll walk through what testing actually looks like when you're dealing with data pipelines, visuals, and fast-changing requirements. Expect practical examples, a few “we really shouldn’t have done that” moments, and tools and strategies that worked better than expected.
From flaky automation to meaningful checks, from CI/CD setup to test oracles for data quality—this talk is about what’s real, not just what’s ideal.
Whether you’re starting with Fabric or just trying to test smarter in complex data systems, this session will give you stories, takeaways, and the confidence to try something new on Monday morning.
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