Philip Lew

OPENING KEYNOTE! Who Moved My Test Cases?

Taken from the classic “Who Moved My Cheese”, which character are you? Hem and Haw or Sniff and Scurry? Are you still waiting for the old cheese to reappear or do you have the curiosity and courage to look for new cheese?

With Covid now come yet not gone, and the economy still sputtering with inflation and high employment, why can’t so many find a job? The fact is, changes are happening so quickly and broadly that we can’t keep up. Governments cannot keep up in tracking the right metrics, and more importantly, we can’t keep up. Not just with changes in technology, but business models, market mechanisms, and our own expectations.

We must adapt as we’ve never done before. As Darwin said:

“It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”

To adapt, we should be on a continuous journey of learning. No longer do we train to be an accountant in college, get a CPA, and remain in that job for a lifetime, the lifetime State Farm agent is no more.

So in some sense, we have to also admit that what we learned before is no longer useful. This is not just for technologies and tools, but possibly our entire frame of reference. Acknowledging and learning new information, while also knowing how to discern real from fake, and noise from signal will be a critical skill going forward not only for this decade but for many to come. In a sense, we are the algorithm and we must decide what learning data set we use to modify the algorithm.

In this keynote, Phil covers what changes will govern and influence our lives over the next decade, how we should view them, and how we can adapt, learn, and prosper going forward, not only as software testers and software quality enthusiasts but as people.