Judges 2020 - Software Testing News

Judging Panel 2020

Delia Brown
Head of QA and Testing
MS Amlin

Dan Camilleri
Software Quality & Test Director
AstraZeneca

Dave Parkinson
Director, Engineering & Certification Services, WWS QA
Sony Interactive Entertainment

Al Sabet
Head of QA & Testing
Oxford University Press

Adam Leon Smith
CTO
Dragonfly

Sandeep Sattani
Director, Testing & QA
Mastercard

Simon Strickland
UK Head of QA, Test & Release Management
Zurich Insurance Company Ltd

Susan Wilkes
Head of QA
EasyJet

BECOME A JUDGE

A truly independent awards programme

The European Software Testing Awards judges are appointed based on their extensive experience in the software testing and QA field. These seasoned professionals, all of whom currently hold senior management roles guarantee that each entry is judged fairly and accurately.

To ensure complete impartiality all entries are judged anonymously with company and/or individual names, products, or references to any identifiable solution and/or service being removed before being distributed to the judges.

This stringent process means that each winner of an award has done so based purely on merit. So regardless of company size, budget, customer base, market share, influence, vendor, academic, end user, consultant or otherwise; The European Software Testing Awards truly is an independent awards programme that recognises and rewards outstanding achievement.

Judges’ feedback

The following are comments gathered from the 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 Judging Panels after they had reviewed all entries. It may help you in deciding on what information to include in your entries.

As a whole the entries did not take into account user experience as much as the Judging Panel would have liked.

Additionally, the entrants should remember that they are being judged by a panel of industry peers and so would do well to pitch the entry to the target audience. A few entries were considered “overly simplistic.”

Entries that fared better tended to:

give explicit evidence of project success (time/money saved, etc.)
show empirical evidence on what the problem was, what they changed and the what they measured to show the success
show willingness to adopt more modern test practices and show some initiative to research how others are improving
include voices of customers/clients, which was helpful in showing successful outcomes
include a strong introduction summarising the project (timelines/scope) and what the expected outcomes were/what the business stakeholders were looking for
give strong evidence of communication skills in the ‘best individual’ categories
give strong evidence of work/involvement outside of their main organisation in the ‘best individual’ categories
emphasise the role of testing and QA throughout the SDLC
demonstrate holistic approach to testing and upskilling of team members
show commercial awareness
not be overly perfect – there is no such thing as a perfect project – it was interesting to hear about the occasional blip in the road and how the team worked to overcome it
clearly discuss project challenges and how they were overcome
give context to metrics to fully justify their inclusion
not attempt to use metrics, which are broadly regarded as bogus (e.g. simply quote test case numbers) but provide a range of metrics which demonstrated success

Weaker entries tended to:

not focus on a project or come across too much like a sales pitch
not give evidence of the project’s purpose/scope/timeline/success
not consider the larger picture
not justify the reasoning behind including metrics
list a large number of acronyms, tools or technology (this just distracted from the original problem and the eventual outcome)