OK, we're at 930. So I'm gonna go ahead and get started. Thanks everyone for joining me today. Um I'm gonna just take a moment to introduce myself.Um My name is Rebecca Becker and I am currently a Q A manager for Vox Media and I'm really excited to be here today to talk to you a little bit about what being a Q A analyst means to me personally, why I think it's an important piece of the engineering life cycle and how I broke into the world of Q A and some tips and tricks and how you can also break into the world of Q A.

So let's go ahead and get started. So I actually began my tech journey by attending university at Rochester Institute of Technology located here in the United States in upstate New York. Not to age myself, but the year was 2001 when I started there. And here I am on the middle of this slide and I have walked into my first class of the information technology department only to be surrounded by all men. So you could say that could be pretty intimidating to a 19 year old girl. Right. However, I didn't really let it phase me at the time. Um back in 2001 was really an early time for women to start getting into technology and pursuing technology degrees. So I was actually really proud to be one of very few women in the information technology department or even pursuing a degree in technology. At that time, during university, my classmates and professors were really, really supportive of me considering I was pretty much the only woman for that entire few four years of university that was in the information technology department. However, when I graduated from there and I got into the working world of tech, uh that was when I started realizing that it wasn't always going to be the case to have all of that support from my male counterparts.

And I had to overcome a lot of hurdles in my career. However, from a young age, starting with university, I started learning that it didn't really matter when anyone else thought of me, regardless of their gender, I wanted to work hard and I wanted to follow my dreams in a tech career. So that's exactly what I did figuring out that I liked Q A. So the very first tech job that I had after graduating university was actually believe it or not, not in quality assurance. I spent the first seven years of my career traveling all over the United States helping to train people and customers how to use software. At the time, I also did a lot of technical writing, documentation and even software support. After doing a few years of many different jobs in tech, I had to stop and ask myself, ok, what do I really want to do here for the rest of my career? And that is when I started to realize I had a couple of passions, I was really passionate about learning products or websites or apps ensuring that the end user had the best experience possible.

And so I started doing a little bit of research into other types of tech careers at the time. And that's how I re realized that quality assurance was the perfect thing for me. So that leads us to this. What exactly is quality assurance? So I put a pretty funny quote on this slide that says, reminds me of this awesome bug report I saw once everything is broken steps to reproduce, do anything expected result, it should work. So if any of you are watching this with me today and you're in Q A, you'll get a huge laugh from this quote. And don't worry, my bug reports are a lot more robust than this. But on a more serious note, quality assurance is oftentimes overlooked and sometimes a really misunderstood field in our tech industry today. And even in the past. So I'm here to kind of say that critic quality assurance to me is a very critical piece of the software development life cycle. And as I mentioned, it's often overlooked at a lot more companies than you'd imagine. I've had experience in my almost 20 year tech career so far of working with companies in the past that solely relied on their product managers or engineers to test their own code.

Of course, as somebody like me in Q A that was a little bit scary to me and having a dedicated team of skilled quality of testers is extremely important. So when a lot of people talk about Q A in our industry or think about Q A, one of the first things that comes to mind is automation or writing code to make automated tests and don't get me wrong. Automation is fantastic and we certainly need it. But I'm here today to talk about my career in manual testing or what you'll sometimes hear the industry refer to it as exploratory testing, which basically is what it sounds like in manual Q A, we really get into the product or the website or the app, whatever we're testing, we click around, we think outside of the box, we find those crazy bugs that the engineer says.

How did you even think of finding that? And that's really the fun part of Q A. And for me to be honest, this part is really never going to go away in our industry. There will always be a need for this human creative aspect. Of quality assurance and finding things and bugs that to be honest, automation code cannot find in this creative way. So now that brings us to the next point of how do I learn Q A or get started? If this interests me, I put only three bullet points on this slide, not just because of my limited time today, but I also think that these three are some of the most important to understand about. If you think Q A sounds interesting and you wanna break into this field, but you're not quite sure how and I think these are oftentimes not talked about enough. So I'm here today to try to break that through and talk about them. And the first one is that you don't need to be a master at writing code or even know how to code if it's something that doesn't interest you in my entire 18 year career. So far, I have not written one single line of code. And I say that because I'm really actually appreciative of that because it's not something that is my main interest. I learned a little bit of HTML and CS S through the years, but coding is not my main interest in tech.

And I have loved working in manual Q A roles. And if you missed the intro of my call, I mentioned that I'm currently a Q A manager which you could absolutely excel in without having to know how to code. So that being said, like I mentioned on a previous slide, if you absolutely love to write code and being a Q A engineer or an automation engineer is more your thing. That's awesome. And like I said earlier, we need a mix of both in Q A. But if you're more like me and writing code just isn't your passion, then you can absolutely pursue a career in manual testing and be really successful at it. The second one is that you don't need any fancy certifications. So it is a fact that nowadays in 2022 there is a plethora of online Q A certifications that you can get, but you don't have to have any to break into Q A and I have not had a single one of certification in my entire career and have been very successful. So again, that's not to steer people away from getting them if you really are interested in them. Absolutely go for it. But I'm just here to tell you that you don't need them to break into the field of Q A. The third point I like to make is that you don't need a highly technical background or degree. A lot of people think a tech career requires a tech degree. And I'm here to say no, it doesn't.

So it is true that I have my information technology degree like I shared in the beginning. But that's because that was a passion of mine at the time in my years in this, in this, in various roles in my tech career. Um As I got into QA a lot of my past and even current Q A team colleagues have had degrees anywhere from marketing to political science, to even journalism. So as you can see, you can certainly get into learning Q A without having a specific technical degree to get you started, you could start in software support like I did or software training or you could get right into a software quality job at a more junior level. I would say that if you have a passion for problem solving, being creative thinking outside the box, finding those strange bugs and making products great, that's enough to start your learning of Q A. And so I love to end on the slide to bring it all together. So here I am again in the middle here, but now I've worked over 18 years in the tech industry and this time as you can see, I'm now surrounded by a lot more women in tech, just like me with a passion for Q A and I hope maybe my talk today inspired you to find that passion too.

So I'm not gonna actually take any live questions due to time constraints. But thank you so much for attending my talk. I hope it opened your eyes a little bit into manual Q A breaking into a career in Q A and learning a little bit more about this great field in tech. If anyone does have any questions or you want to connect with me, I have my personal email on the slide. Also, if you scroll all the way up in the chat of this session, I did post my linkedin link at the top of this chat and I also put my personal email here if you'd like to reach out. Thank you so much. Again, it was so fun doing this talk. Bye everyone.