Help! I jedi-d too hard and became a leader!

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, Alex and Huib Schoots did a talk on Jedi Mind Tricks for Testers. After using these mind tricks themselves for a long time, they noticed that they got the opportunity to become leaders, which they took. With their acute observation skills, they’ve also noticed that many other testers follow this route. What is it about testers that makes this happen so often?

[Huib unfortunately will be not able to co-speak, but inspired and influenced the content of the talk.]

This talk is for anyone interested in moving into leadership from testing roles, or considering whether it’s for them (it doesn’t matter if you didn’t see the original talk). Based on our own experience and observations of others, I’ll talk about what factors of testing work prepare us for leadership – and even put us forward for it.

During the talk, I’ll introduce the relevant “mind tricks” we already defined (so everyone is on the same page), and talk about how the frequent usage of it over the years results in suitability for leadership.

For example:

• that we’ve invited ourselves to all the meetings: now we have very broad knowledge, which has let us see where we can improve quality at other places, and also means that we are capable of seeing the big picture.
• That we’ve used biscuit driven development to encourage others to work with us, and now we have an internal network, some social standing, and ways of influencing to get what we want.

I’ll also talk about which parts of the tester mindset we need to change or leave behind us to prepare us,  and what we needed to learn on top of what we already knew.

To finish up, I’ll give an overview of “a day in the life” of a leader to let you feel what it can be like to help you decide if you want to make the step.