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.
Automated Testing for Fabric: What Works and What Doesn’t
Microsoft Fabric promises an end-to-end analytics platform, but when it comes to testing, the reality is far less clear-cut.
In this session, I’ll share what testing Fabric actually looked like on a large government transformation programme, where data pipelines, Power BI, CI/CD, and automation all collided under real delivery pressure. This isn’t a “best practice” talk—it’s an honest account of what worked, what broke, and what we had to rethink along the way.
We’ll start by setting the context: what Fabric changes about testing, where traditional approaches fall down, and the new risks that appear when you move from APIs and UIs to analytics, pipelines, and reports. From there, I’ll walk through concrete examples from real code, pipelines, and Power BI artefacts—covering data validation, flaky automation, CI/CD integration, and how we decided what not to automate.
The session closes with a worked example and a clear set of takeaways that teams can apply immediately.
You’ll leave with:
Practical approaches to testing Fabric pipelines and Power BI outputs without chasing false confidence
Ways to define meaningful test oracles for data quality and analytics
Examples of automation patterns that helped—and anti-patterns that slowed teams down
Ideas for structuring CI/CD feedback in fast-moving data platforms
Session structure (flexible: 40–60 minutes)
Core talk (40 minutes):
10 mins – Context: Fabric, analytics testing, and real-world constraints
20 mins – Lessons learned: pipelines, visuals, automation, and CI/CD
10 mins – Worked example and concrete takeaways
Hidden Voices, Lost Ideas: Breaking the Pattern in Technology
When asked to name pioneers of the internet, most people cite Tim Berners-Lee. Yet the technologies we rely on every day would not function as they do without the contributions of women such as Radia Perlman, Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler, Karen Spärck Jones, and many others whose work has been overlooked or forgotten.
This talk introduces ten women whose ideas fundamentally shaped modern computing, from networking and search to programming languages and AI. Through their stories, we will examine how patterns of exclusion, particularly those that intensified from the mid-1980s onward, have shaped who is remembered, who is credited, and whose ideas are amplified in technology.
This session goes beyond celebration to explore how patterns of inclusion and exclusion have shaped the technology sector over time. It examines why women’s participation in computer science declined so sharply from the mid-1980s, how cultural narratives and working environments influenced that shift, and why these patterns still matter today, affecting workplace culture, innovation, and the technologies we build and rely on.
A moment for reflection:
By revisiting these stories and recognising the women behind the technology we use every day, attendees are invited to reflect on whose voices they notice, remember, and amplify in their own environments. The session encourages small, thoughtful actions such as being curious about overlooked contributions, supporting inclusive conversations, or simply sharing these stories more widely, as gentle ways to help create a more welcoming and representative tech community.
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