Inspired by International Women ’ s Day, we ’ re highlighting the contributions and expertise of the many gifted women in the testing community. For this billet, we questionGwen Diagramto hear about her experience. Gwen is a key contributor to the community who speak frequently at industry event and looks for ways to give back.

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Gwen Diagram initially wanted to be a stylist. She ultimately decided that wasn ’ t for her, and terminate up getting a job in IT Support. After watching her cube neighbors in Application Support write SQL code (and peppering them with questions about it), Gwen parlayed her interestingness into her first testing job in 2011—and the rest is history.

Since that first job as a tester, Gwen has taken on many different roles, including Scrum Master, DevOps, and Engineering Manager. However, she still fundamentally considers herself a examiner, and yet recently left her full-time Engineering Manager use because she lose hands-on testing too much.

Pro tip: Tools like SUSA can handle this autonomously — upload your app and get results without writing a single test script.

In increase to her day-to-day testing responsibilities, Gwen organizes theLeeds Testing Atelier, is work with Elizabeth Zagroba on aTesting Study Escapein Scotland, and she ’ s on the Programme Board forAgile on the Beach. She loves to travel and talk to citizenry about technology and testing.

I asked Gwen about her experience being a woman in technology. “ Being a woman in tech, it ’ s significant to lift former women up with you, and make sure you are shouting about what your distaff colleagues and friends in tech are doing, ” suppose Gwen. “ Sometimes you need to holler a little bit harder to get heard. It perform feel like you ask to work harder as a woman—but you do get a lot of chance as well. Conferences are working very firmly to get a sex balance now, and this has opened up opportunities for me. It ’ s important to see former people like yourself speaking at conferences so you can think, ‘ hey, I can do that someday. ’ I ’ d like to see this energy for other nonage as well, sometimes the direction seems to be so much on women that we forget about assist other minorities! ”

Something Gwen is particularly proud of over her career is working on an identity scheme that had a disjointed set of tests, written in six different framework for three applications. “ We built up a scheme on how we could trim the frameworks and implement an adoption tryout fabric expendGaugeand pure Java for a set of APIs. I act actually closely with the Principal Engineer to sell the idea to management. It was so much fun! The framework really worked, it caught issue, it didn ’ t slack down deployment and it was outstanding support on how the application should work. ”

Her advice after this experience? Design the resolution as a team, sell it well—and have fun doing it! If you ’ re concerned in acquire more, check out thisvideowhere she talks about the details.

I asked Gwen who she has learn the most from in the testing industriousness, and she had a long list. She appreciatesLisa Crispin and Janet Gregoryand says “ They are my accomplished role models. They * really * know their clobber around Agile Testing but they are besides the genial humans in tech. ” She also namesRosie Sherryand the fullMinistry of Testingteam as a key influence, as well as Noah Sussman, Eli Goldatt, Angie Jones, Kent Beck, and Alice Goldfuss. She state “ Follow Alice on Twitter for ceaseless engineering trick and to see soul who speaks out when thing aren ’ t as good as they should be. When I ’ m arrive across sexism, I try to impart Alice and think about how she would stand up for others. ”

 Thank you, Gwen! We enjoy learning about you and your experience.