That time my great grandfather didn't die - Putting the engineering in computer engineering

Session type: 45 min talk

Session level: Intermediate

All layers in the organization knows what best practice is, yet it’s hard to enforce it. Why do we act against our own wish and will?

I will start this talk in a 100 year old accident with personal implications for me personally. A sinking boat, two drowning artists, and my great grandfather being the sole survivor.

The accident was caused by well-known handling errors, enforced by the whole organization from top to bottom. Economic considerations as well as tedious, repetitive manual labor caused a well-built boat to sink.

I see strong parallels between this accident and my work as an agile tester.

Key take-aways:

Emma will argue that the IT business is about as mature as the physical engineering branches were a 100 years ago, and a combination of the GDPR and agile methods is our best hope of changing from a Wild West business to something more modern. Computer engineering differs from any other kind of engineering because of its lack of enforcement of standardized frameworks, checklists and due diligence.