Eric Thompson, Puppet Labs
Desperation to leave testing/QA jobs is something many of us have felt in the past. Poor management, no advancement, no focus on Quality. Retaining talent in this crucial discipline is challenging.
With the continuing growth in the Pacific North-West’s tech-sector and the opportunities in software specifically, and an increasingly automated testing environment, how do we retain top quality talent in QA? In software engineering there are many studies that support “three pillars” of motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.
Can we use these tenets to motivate and retain testing engineers? The overlap of SDETs and software engineers seems obvious, but what about testers and analysts? We discuss how to tailor classical retention tactics that can otherwise hurt productivity and retention, and additional techniques to attain, not only perceived, but felt: Autonomy, Mastery, and/or Purpose. We discuss the depth and breadth of the nature of each, how they relate to, or contradict classical methods, and how they contribute to our productivity as problem finders and solvers.
Target Audience: Expert/Advanced
Eric Thompson, 2016 Technical Paper, Abstract, Paper, Slides, Notes, Video.
