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Hristina Koleva

Hristina Koleva

Product Owner, ICB

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session

Hello, Assumption, My Old Friend! Or Can A Tester Make A Good Product Owner?

About the Talk

For 17 years as a QA, I haven't worked with a good Product Owner, and I thought to myself, I have to figure out why! Why is it so difficult?! How could I find all these bugs, and they couldn't write a decent user story?!

It turned out to be a real challenge.

In this talk, I want to share my journey from a very senior QA to a very junior Product Owner - how my testing skills helped me be a better product owner for my team and what skills I had to unlearn.

Here's a tiny spoiler alert - the first law of testing is 'Never make assumptions'. The first law of product ownership is 'Be aware that you're always making an assumption.'

Using examples from my experience, I'll share insights from working 'on the other side of the fence'. I've realized that achieving better collaboration between developers, testers, and product owners needs deliberate effort to understand each other better. How to engage the Team in this effort? Are we working in an environment that enables this type of collaboration?

  • Why should all acceptance criteria be written in decision tables?
  • Why are there indeed bugs we can live with?
  • When a bug is a feature?
  • Why your product owner is your best friend?
  • When the product owner must get it all figured out first, and when you don't need them?
  • What's a good user story, and why it's useless?
  • Test cases forever!
  • What do Product owners need from the testers?
  • How does working with a Product Owner help testers develop new skills?
  • Why you should never skip the preconditions? ... and more.

Testers are taught to put themselves in your customers' shoes. Product Owners need to put themselves in their Teams' shoes and always ask - what does the Team need to get it done (and tested)?

To all Product Owners, this talk is food for thought - do you seek and appreciate input from the testers early enough in the process? Testers know what could go wrong, and it should go straight into your acceptance criteria.

Testers, this talk will encourage you to challenge the story. Keep asking the Why question and help your Product Owners consider the edge cases, as they might turn into mainstream features.

Key Takeaways:

  • Learn more about the work of the Product Owner
  • Get inspired to provide quality feedback on the user stories
  • Apply testing practices to define better requirements
  • Break the silos and work better together

About the Speaker

Hristina Koleva is a software tester, product owner, and mentor with 18 years from intern to Head of QA and now in a product role. Her mission is to help teams start on the right foot with quality and agile workflows and overcome challenges such as no testing in place, inadequately sliced and poorly written requirements, low team engagement, and huge process waste.

Hristina firmly believes in efficient practices, the whole-team approach, and intensive collaboration as key drivers for delivering working software and growing thriving teams. She also teaches software testing and agile practices and finds joy in sharing and learning at webinars, meetups, and conferences.

About Testµ Conference

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