Penny Allen seeks challenges and appears to have done so ever since she left Lockheed Martin after an eight-year career in 2002. Her longest stint post-L-M has been three years, her shortest less than a year. Among stops along the way: DelTek, TEKsystems, Fiserv, Message Systems, Nike and now REI. She’s jumped all over the map in her quest to tackle something no one else could bring down, including spending nearly six years in Oregon. She’s still newly minted at REI, joining the team there as digital solutions engineering director last December.
The three keynote speakers at this year’s conference come from widely varying backgrounds and cultures. Two are prolific writers, the third an insatiable seeker of difficult challenges. Together, they will provide conference attendees with a three very different opportunities to have their practices questioned, their testing and QA philosophies disrupted and their opinions turned on their heads.
Rich Sheridan and Katy Sherman are both writers as well as QA and development professionals. Sheridan has penned two books and Sherman has created a virtual library on LinkedIn with her many articles.
Penny Allen may be too busy solving her latest challenge to do much writing. She’s been seeking tough cases to crack ever since she left Lockheed Martin after an eight-year career in 2002. Her longest stint post-L-M has been three years, her shortest less than a year. Among stops along the way: DelTek, TEKsystems, Fiserv, Message Systems, Nike and now REI. She’s jumped all over the map in her quest to tackle something no one else could bring down, including spending nearly six years in Oregon.
She’s still newly minted at REI, joining the team there as digital solutions engineering director last December. While at Nike for three years, she moved their development team from treading water status to pounding through the DevOps waves as she helped the team master the latest software development techniques.
“Nike does software engineering with the incredible passion it does everything — fast and audacious. When the time came to evolve towards DevOps and Continuous Delivery they dived in headfirst. I joined Nike as an Engineering Director at the pivot point in this evolution. They knew what they wanted and were swimming as fast they could but making no discernible progress,” she says on her LinkedIn site. “Armed with the knowledge that we had three areas we needed to tackle (understanding, culture, and skills), I led the transformation of two separate quality organizations from manual to a DevOps/CD model of automation and quality engineering.”
How does she describe her professional focus and essential skill set? On LinkedIn, she says: “My goal is simple: high quality and relevant digital solutions. As an engineering leader, I specialize in finding the sweet spot between velocity, business needs, and ingenuity to help companies do fabulous things.”
During her presentation this fall, she promises to divulge the secret to achieving higher quality software under greater pressure from within and without.
Says Allen: “The motivation to develop digital experiences faster and better is the centerpiece of the Quality Engineering movement. Said more simply, we have to do even more with even less despite galactic level complexity and consumer expectations. The question is: How? We have to evolve our tool set, our techniques, and even our thought processes. In a very real sense, we have to redefine ourselves and our craft and we have to do it NOW before the choices are made for us.”
I don’t think you’ll want to miss this one!
