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"QA or the Highway" - great event in Columbus, Ohio.

Last week I had a great opportunity to spend a few days in US and visit the “QA or the Highway” 10th anniversary edition in Columbus Ohio. It was possible thanks to the great support from the conference organisers and SJSI - Polish Testing Board who helped me significantly with the logistics.

"QA or the Highway" - great event in Columbus, Ohio.

Last week I had a great opportunity to spend a few days in US and visit the “QA or the Highway” 10th anniversary edition in Columbus Ohio. It was possible thanks to the great support from the conference organisers and SJSI - Polish Testing Board who helped me significantly with the logistics.

About Conference

“QA or the highway” builds a community of Software Quality interested experts with a yearly conference and in addition some smaller meet-up catch-up. The Ohio Union venue is a great place at the University site with nice rooms and infrastructure for such a conference. There were multiple partner stands I personally spend the most of time at Parasoft and mabl stands discussing global trends and AI - datacenter related challenges. I encourage You to take a look at:

https://lighthousetechnologies.com/

https://www.mabl.com/

https://www.parasoft.com/

Early Keynote

Back to the conference, I was surprised that it starts from 7.00am, was thinking most of people will just not be there as in Europe we usually start with registration from 8 and keynote at 9. But from the start and a nice breakfast provided by the organisers the room was packed and at 7.50 we opened the conference, followed by great talk by Ronald Cummings-John about “Leading Quality” - thanks for the book Ronald !! You can connect with him here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronaldcj/

Then there was a packed set of presentations by people from US and Europe all of them You can check listed:

https://www.qaorthehwy.com/schedule

My Talk

It is hard for me to say to much about them as my session was first after the lunch so I spend all the 2 slots after keynote getting ready for my presentation. I feel stressed a lot as it was my first presentation on a conference outside the Europe, and 2nd presentation I was doing to a room of English native speakers. To be honest the first one was not good I did a subject that I presented on multiple occasions, but stress had beaten me. This time it went a lot better, I was doing a presentation about Remote Work and Remote Leadership with a specific European challenges that we face. It turned out a lot of people works at companies with remote sites in Germany or Poland and we had a lot of discussions about the culture, way of working and differences between US and Europe IT market situation.

For anybody interested in the slides from the talk it is available here:

QA or the Highway - Team Leadership in the time of being remote
QA or the Highway - Team Leadership in the time of being remote.pdf
3 MB
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Networking

The rest of the afternoon until the closing keynote was just focused on networking and discussions. Here I would love to mention and give a big thanks to few of You that I am still digesting our discussion about IT, USA culture, work, economy and many more subjects:

Closing keynote

At the closing keynote Andrew Knight did a wonderful job in giving the audience a space to have fun and relax, where he spoke about his adventure with VW Beetle and how some QA and IT work experience can help us in our private hobbies and interests. I saw a great example here about how switching off is important and how our off work activities can give us frustration but also a sense of completion and success. Great Talk Andrew, hope the adventure continues.

One more time a big thanks to conference program committee for the invitation and SJSI for support. It was a BLAST !!

Best Reagrds, Mike.

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