Does Testing Equal QA? Lessons Beyond Software Development

Quality assurance is much more than just testing — it's a way to ensure that outcomes will meet expectations. Designing processes that build quality from the start, we reduce reliance on testing afterwards while achieving better, more consistent results. In this talk, I'll demonstrate how QA principles apply universally, from software development to hiring, security, and even organising meetups.

I'll share practical strategies, such as long-term community work and mentorship instead of reviewing CVs and exhaustive interviews for hiring, investing in continuous training instead of excessive audits for security, and pair work with speakers instead of merely filtering them by their proposals.

“Quality is not something you can inspect into a product” — it's the result of deliberate, thoughtful processes. This talk will inspire you to rethink how you approach quality at work.

Don’t aim for more testing, aim for higher quality!

QA Myths Busting: A Practical Guide to Higher Quality

Have you ever felt the urge to increase the amount of testing, thinking it would directly improve product quality? Have you ever been held “accountable” for quality or pressed for time, leaving you feeling helpless? Or perhaps you’ve been asked to justify quality assurance initiatives with numbers?

Our industry is filled with myths: from “quality can be measured” to “more testing means higher quality” and from “QA slows down work” to “testers are responsible for quality”. I believed them all too once, then I started questioning my beliefs when I saw how product quality improved when we reduced code coverage from 70% to 40% — I then realised that quality metrics are only proxy metrics and their correlation should be revisited regularly.

Join me and let's see what dangers all these myths pose to both teams and products, and how they should be debunked and overcome.

QA Approaches in Hiring: From Shift-Left Testing to Shewhart’s Control Charts

When you interview people, how efficient and effective is your testing process? How often do you reject a candidate and ask recruiters to bring in another one, and how do you track that process waste? What signals tell you to revise your testing method? How do you measure the quality of the sourcing stage, and how can you help improve it if most of the candidates don’t pass the interviews?

Hiring is just a process, and our common QA approaches can be applied to its stages to improve efficiency: from shift-left testing to pair work, from applying Shewhart’s control chart to designing the testing strategy (interviews!) based on the necessary quality attributes.

If you participate in hiring, or at least share my belief that having a solid team is the main prerequisite for successful development and testing, join this talk and we’ll explore how to improve hiring as a good tester would.

Would You Compare Code Reviews to Astrology? I Would

We don't use astrology in hiring, yet we search for the root cause in our postmortems. We don't hammer screws into wood, yet we bring the same code review process to a new company that we utilized at a previous job. We don’t rely on fortune cookie predictions for new feature success, yet we sometimes treat engineers’ estimates as exact timelines.

With the progress in behavioral economics and psychology we understand better how deeply irrational human beings can be. We inherit the status quo of our processes and rarely question it. However, many of the processes are the results of numerous cognitive biases and mental sets.

In this talk, I present a rational approach to work that allows us to recognize where intuition and "common sense" fail us, act more rationally, make optimal decisions, and work happier.

preferred duration: 30 minutes
target audience: IT folks, from managers to engineers

Evolutionary and Game Theory Perspective on Trust

Have you ever been promised a pay rise or promotion that didn't happen? Have you ever felt an unfair comparison in performance reviews? Do you trust your manager and colleagues?

In my 23 years in IT, I've felt distrust many times. This led me to the discovery of game theory and organisational psychology, and to finding answers that explain the impact of trust on our professional lives and beyond.

This helped me to become the manager I wish I had.

I will share my learnings on how trust enables teamwork and collaboration, functioning as a powerful driver in a non-zero-sum game that yields better results. We will also explore how certain managerial approaches — such as KPIs and performance reviews — negatively affect trust, and offer a better approach.

session duration: 35 minutes
target audience: Engineering managers, CTOs, engineers

Embracing Agile Principles in Hiring

Have you ever regretted a hiring decision that went awry, or found yourself overwhelmed by choosing the "right" candidate? The traditional methods of recruitment leave you and your team stuck in a cycle of inefficiency and dissatisfaction during the endless interviews.

Have you considered PDCA (Plan Do Change Act cycle) for the hiring process?

In this talk, I will share my experience of transforming the hiring process by following Agile principles. I will explore how embracing change and focusing on quality assurance from the sourcing stage can lead to more aligned, efficient, and effective hiring outcomes.

Let's challenge the status quo together!

target audience: anyone interested or participating in hiring

The Ethical Firing You Wish You Experienced

Let's get comfortable with this uncomfortable topic before we have to fire someone.

Besides the usual process, there are two main overlooked aspects to firing: ethical and economical.

Rome wasn't built in a day, and decision-making in firing should also take time and effort. The unhealthy myth of "everyone is replaceable" can cost the company a lot. Most of us are morale-driven humans. You can avoid feeling like a hypocrite if you have an ethical code to support your professional decisions.

Explore with me the data, facts and principles for the beneficial firing. Most of the colleagues I fired would work with me again. That's why if done right, firing could be a win-win for both the company and the employee in question.

When Testing Is Not Enough: QA Lessons from Hiring, Security, and Meetup Organisation

Quality assurance is much more than just testing — it's a mindset and a proactive approach to ensuring that outcomes will meet expectations. In this talk, I'll demonstrate how QA principles apply universally, from software development to hiring, security, and even organising meetups.

By focusing on designing processes that build quality in from the start, we can reduce reliance on testing while achieving better, more consistent results.

I'll share practical strategies, such as investing in continuous training instead of excessive audits for security, long-term community work and mentorship instead of reviewing CVs and exhaustive interviews for hiring, and pair work with speakers instead of merely filtering speakers by looking at abstracts.

Quality is not something you can inspect into a system — it's the result of deliberate, thoughtful processes. This talk will inspire you to expand beyond testing and rethink how you approach quality at work.