Marta Firlej

You Can’t Grow Without People

Short Description of presentation

Over four years ago I decided to change company and look for new opportunities. I never imagined that I would work for a huge Ukrainian software house with over 25 years of experience on the market. The one thing that surprised me the most when I joined, was the set knowledge model that was applied to every developer, business analyst and software tester at the company. I started to dig deeper into why it is the first company I know to build such a tool. The reason was simple, the company had experienced an unsustainable growth and there was a need to build a company-wide process/solution for people growth and company stability. 

I would like to share the Knowledge Models that were developed and show how it looked till end of 2018. It supported growth from 500+ software testers in 2014 to 1000+ at the end of 2018. Unfortunately there are disadvantages of such a solution. I would like to shortly summarize problems we noticed, such as: people believing that they achieving “everything”, people feeling that they are blocked, not growing and not getting promotions because of the specific projects, people misusing/hacking the knowledge model procedures to achieve the next level, a better project etc. Due to company size and the problems mentioned above the knowledge model has to evolve. 

When I joined Quality Management Office, I analyzed how the current knowledge model addresses changes and we noticed as a company that it is not good enough. We are extending the existing knowledge model to the competence model by describing not only the knowledge that software testers should demonstrate but also their expected behaviors. We are working now on describing each person’s craftsmanship by setting a competence model, to highlight their professionalism and better understanding of different sub-domains for each and every software tester in our company. We have to make a transition from just a good software tester to professional specialist (web/mobile/performance/etc.) tester. 

Short Biographical Note of Speaker

Marta Firlej started her journey with software testing in 2006. She is engaged in quality assurance and competence development. She had the opportunity to not only build and develop testing teams, but also work with customers to create, develop, and design software. The initiator of Testing Conference test:fest in Wroclaw. Member of the committee of judges in Polish TesingCup Championships in 2013 and 2014. Volunteer and speaker to various conferences. 

Outside of work, Marta likes to travel, cook, and goes cycling.