I'm Looking for a Tester / Value Stream Compadre

I’m looking for someone to join me at Pillar Technology to help our clients improve their testing, quality, and value work for their delivery teams. Interested? Read on!

We’re filling a position for an Executive Consultant—someone as a mid-level to senior-level consultant. Pillar doesn’t do staff augmentation (generally). We work with clients who are honestly looking to transform how they look at solving problems through software. My efforts with clients to date have been both tactical and strategic.

At the tactical level I’ve been involved in building testers’ basic testing skills, learning appropriate automation, and working to change mindsets about focusing on valuable work. That’s come about through workshops, pairing, ongoing training, and helping get work done.

Pillar’s strategic level work for our clients helps organizations find ways to increase value by adopting new processes, practices, and mindsets. That means learning to effectively communicate with the “business” side of the house around things like value streams, flow of work, whole-team quality practices (No, testers are not the Quality Assurance folks.), modernizing testing skills, and a host of other activities.

We’re looking for mid- or senior-level consultants to come on board and dive in with me. Here’s the “Must Have” list:

• Empathy. We value our roles as trusted advisors. Empathy to the clients’ situations is crucial.
• Attitude. You’re doing the job because you want to. You’re helping lift others up because you see the benefits.
• Aptitude. You’re able to be successful. What you don’t know you’re willing to dive in and learn—.

Some experiences that are helpful:

• Walk the walk. You’ve been a practitioner of agile and Lean approaches over a number of years. You know how to adjust for situational context.
• Understand the power of “I don’t know.” Have the confidence to admit weaknesses, because you know where to go find answers and help.
• **Skilled at quickly building up an effective test plan.**You know how to focus on risk, value, and what the customer feels is most important.
• Experience talking value to business. You know the difference between creating epics, features, and user stories that are technical solutions versus items that deliver value to the customer.

Specific tools in your belt/bag that are helpful:

• Exploratory testing. You’ve done it, and you can explain why it’s different than ad-hoc or monkey testing.
• Software craftsmanship. You’re able to talk about why it’s important and can provide some guidance around it, even if you’re not a developer by trade.
• Automated testing. You’ve done it with different tools, you’ve suffered with mistakes you’ve made, and you’ve worked through those mistakes. You know where it fits, where it doesn’t, and how to create a good map of coverage of different testing types. You also understand and deeply believe in the difference between checking and testing, even if you don’t care to waste time arguing about what’s a test or check.

Interested? Drop me a line: JHolmes@PillarTechnology.com. I’d love to chat with you!