Happy to be supporting the State of Testing report again…keeps getting better every year! Nice!

Get the full report HERE

Hey everyone – This is the editorial I wrote for the latest edition of Women Testers. I took it as a chance to spotlight some influential women I’ve had the pleasure to either work with or learn from. The full edition can be found here. Thanks! – KK

Examples matter. In my experience, behavior modeling is one, if not THE most powerful influences on how we treat people and develop professionally either individually or as an organization. As someone who has led groups of all shapes and sizes and has reported into the highest levels of enterprise tech, I can assure you people are watching. Watching and emulating. That’s why examples matter – but if they are to have a positive impact they have to be seen.

Over the last twenty years I have had the opportunity to work with countless amazing, strong, intelligent women. Through this editorial, I wanted to take the opportunity to shine a light on some people who have had, and continue to have, the biggest impact on me professionally and inspire me personally. They became my examples to emulate by mentoring me, kicking my ass, and just being generally awesome at what they do. As well, as a father of two young boys, it is extremely important for them, so they can see things as they are and how they should be.

So here are some of my heroes – the smart, fierce, funny, and influential women who inspire me to be my best. Enjoy! Continue reading …

Looking forward to seeing you all at QualityJam in Atlanta!

Hi everyone – Kristoffer Nordström is a dear friend to the software testing community. He has been met with a terrible brain tumor diagnosis for his little girl, Linnea. To help them out, I’ll be donating from speaking fees I get this year from TestBash, Romanian Test Conference, QualityJam, CopenhagenContext and anything else that pops up to their YouCaring fund.

If you’re a speaker on software testing conference circuit and can afford donating from speaking fees / honorariums, I would encourage you to join me. Please consider doing whatever you can to help and apologies for the personal plea…thanks – Keith

YouCaring Donation Site

Having recently attended and presented a keynote at my first Agile Testing Days in Germany, I wanted to respond to the sad news that Agile Testing Days US has been cancelled “due to the current political situation in the USA.” I had heard the rumors and  as they had invited me to come to Boston and support the  event, I reached out to the conference organizers to see if there was anything I could do to change their minds. Unfortunately there was nothing that could be done to salvage the conference as speakers had already pulled out and attendees were either concerned about getting into the US or had already changed their plans. As well, AgileTD has a very strong commitment to diversity and out of respect to their values a principled stance against discrimination needed to be taken.

As  heartbreaking as this is for me as a testing professional and American, I completely understand and support this decision. Elections matter. What is going on the US political environment and in a broader cultural sense has consequences, and unfortunately I don’t think we’ve seen the last of cancellations like this. Personally, I would have loved to see the conference go on as planned and damn the torpedoes of hate and oppression, but it wasn’t my decision to make. I fully support the organizers of AgileTD and have offered my support in any way for their future events. Best of luck to everyone in these troubling times and stay safe. 

Thanks everyone for attending my webinar with Tekmark and QASymphony – I had a great time doing it and there were so many questions we grouped them into themes. Here are my answers and as usual, these are just like, my opinions. Hope to see you all on the conference circuit soon! Cheers! Continue reading …

Many thanks to my friends at QASymphony and Tekmark for putting this together! Enjoy!

Had fun answering this Q&A session from my pal Rob Lambert for the Romanian Testing Conference – hope to see you there! Enjoy! 

Tell us a bit about yourself

I’ve worked in software quality and testing for around 20 years and head up the SQM practice at Tekmark Global Solutions. The greater part of my career has been spent in what I call “enterprise IT”, which are organizations built by multinational companies that use and build a lot of technology, but their core business is not technology. I’ve run large testing programs for Barclays, Citigroup, and UBS primarily in Investment Banking and Wealth Management.

Continue reading …

Time again for the “State of Testing Survey” from our friends at PractiTest and Tea Time with Testers…good stuff in there about how folks are feeling about the testing industry…enjoy!

“The State of Testing seeks to identify the existing characteristics, practices and challenges facing the testing community in hopes to shed light and provoke a fruitful discussion towards  improvement.”

TAKE SURVEY

Putting together a good conference program is hard. Ensuring the topics are relevant and attracting talented speakers that people want to hear is only further complicated by the commercial aspects of covering costs and turning a profit for the organizers. Striking the right balance between diversity of topics as well as underrepresented communities while seeking the best speakers presents difficult choices for every selection committee.

I’ve written before about how little of my life experiences has been down to things I can control, like effort and hard work and the rest has just been dumb luck and privilege. So when I first read the following tweet it triggered a reaction in me which isn’t entirely helpful. My feelings of  “poor baby” were the first to hit me – here we go again, another “white guy” complaining about some fictitious “lowering of the bar” to meet some conference diversity target.

Now that reaction isn’t entirely fair, but frankly neither is the system, and I also feel that this idea that the “best” talks are what’s represented at conferences is just BS. As a veteran attendee, speaker, and selection committee member at many, many tech conferences, I can assure you that in my experience and opinion, bias and preference plays a great deal in who you see on that stage. So while I might agree with the sentiment in principle, I don’t believe it is always possible in practice.

Continue reading …

Hey everyone! It’s time again for my QASymphony/Tekmark annual take on the testing industry and what trends/topics I think we’ll be talking about over the next year. Hope you can make it! Register HERE

“In this webinar, Keith Klain, Head of Software Quality Management at Tekmark Global Solutions, will take a “state of the union” approach to discussing Software Testing trends that will define 2017. Including:

• Test automation, devops, and operational test management
• “Agile Testing” and the rise of machine learning
• The future of the enterprise “Testing CoE”
• Cool stuff to watch for in 2017 – people, places and things!”

Just back from my first Agile Testing Days in Potsdam, Germany and have to report that I had a really fun time, met some old friends (made some new ones), and participated in some great conversations about software testing. I was there to present my keynote “Lessons Learned in (Selling) Software Testing” about my experiences trying to help large, enterprise tech organizations through agile transitions or various other “test process improvement” initiatives. I had a great time giving the talk and got a lot of good feedback from the conference as well as on Twitter:

Clearly, I owe this person money… 😀

Continue reading …

Very excited to be giving a keynote and workshop at the Romanian Testing Conference on May, 10-12th, 2017! The following is the theme and please register here to attend – hope to see you there!

The theme for the conference is “Thriving in testing – remaining relevant“…

Continue reading …

TESTING IN THE PUB EPISODE 38 – MAKING BETTER TESTERS WITH KEITH KLAIN – PART 2

Welcome back to episode 38 of Testing In the Pub – Making Better Testers with Keith Klain.

In part two of a two part episode we talk to Keith about how we can help testers and the testing community to improve and keep learning. Keith spends a lot of his time promoting and educating people about better testing practices such as Context Driven Testing and the transition to better testing, particularly in the enterprise. Have a listen as we discuss this and our experiences of older and more traditional ways of working.

Listen to the whole episode HERE