Quality With Hearts Aligned - Bolstering Your Quality with Emotional Intelligence

Quality is more than just numbers in a report, bugs filed, or the tests you run. How do you get teams to align on your qualitative vision? How do you convince others that high quality standards are the right thing to do and how do you compromise to make achieving high quality possible? Emotional intelligence is the key to it all. Quality goes beyond just convincing your team to meet high standards, it's about connecting with them to better understand why they resist and how you can meet them where they're at. Understanding the people you are working with, understanding their frustrations and concerns and looking beyond those surface level discussions to uncover the true reason for push back. In this, the spiritual successor to Art in Code and Quality , we take a journey deep into that which makes teams build relationships and explore the aspects of emotional intelligence that you can leverage to bolster quality across your organization.

Paper | Presentation

Sophia McKeever

Sophia McKeever is a self taught Software Development Engineer in Test and has been in the industry for over twelve years. She has a passion for test automation and has built test automation in both front end and back end applications. She got her start at DataSphere Technologies Inc., a start up in the advertising space, moving from a Customer Service role into a Software Test Engineer role, and worked her way into being a vendor with Microsoft Azure building their UI Automation frameworks for the Signup and management portals. She then went to The Pokémon Company International building test automation for Pokemon.com and their Game Studio Backend team before taking a role at Apple's Apple Media Services team writing UI automation for iOS and macOS. A year later she returned to Pokémon to help redesign the automation architecture for the Organized Play team. In 2023 she achieved the Top Paper Award at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference for her paper and presentation, Art in Code and Quality, which explored the creative aspects of software engineering and how quality engineers can use that knowledge to build relationships.