João Proença & Michael Kutz

João Proença comes from Lisbon, Portugal, and is Quality Owner in R&D for OutSystems, a company that provides one of the leading low-code development platforms in the world. He has assumed various roles throughout his career in the past 13 years, including quality assurance, development, customer support and marketing. Finding innovative solutions for difficult problems is what drives him the most, so he is always eager to talk about how professionals are overcoming testing challenges around the world. Outside of IT, João is passionate about songwriting, movies and football. You’ll see him tweet about all of these topics using the @jrosaproenca handle.

Michael Kutz has been working in professional software development for more than 10 years now. He loves to write working software, and he hates fixing bugs. Hence, he developed a strong focus on test automation, continuous delivery/deployment and agile principles.

Since 2014 Michael works at digital as a software engineer and since 2018 as quality engineer. As such his main objective is to support development teams in QA and test automation to empower them to write awesome bug-free software fast.

14:25 - 16:20

October 28 Day 2 - Workshops

Meet Your Own Biases

You’ve certainly heard that word before: “bias”. Today, a lot of controversial topics surround that word and for a good reason. After all, bias is at the core of a lot of discrimination and prejudice issues in our world.

However, did you know there are many different types of biases that influence our judgement every day and are not related with discrimination?

For instance, have you heard of Loss Aversion? It states that humans experience losing something much more intensely than they do when acquiring it. It really affects our judgement, for instance, when you are contemplating on the idea of deleting an automated test!

Maybe the Gambler’s fallacy influences the way you handle flaky tests? Or maybe the Spotlight Effect blocks you from driving changes in your organization?

In this workshop, we want you to experience some of these cognitive biases first-hand! After all, acknowledging that our behavior, as human beings, is impacted by these factors is the first step in learning how to improve our rational judgement. We’re also going to try to relate these behaviors with our professional lives. Maybe you can even come up with your own ideas on how cognitive biases hinder our abilities as testers and engineers.

Let’s learn together! So join us and, please, bring your cognitive biases with you!

Key-Learnings:

  • Experience for yourself some of the cognitive biases that affect our day-to-day rational judgement.
  • Understand how cognitive biases are connected to some of our behaviors as professionals.
  • Learn about materials you can follow-up on if you’re interested in knowing more about cognitive biases.