We’re in This Together - Mentoring a New Tester as a New Tester
Picture this situation: You’re the lone tester in your team. You find out that the company has just hired another tester. After a little digging you discover this is someone with little or no testing experience. You want to help the new hire, but maybe you aren’t all that experienced yourself. A bigger hurdle is that you’re also new to mentoring.
Not so long ago, I was a junior tester in a company that hired someone with no previous experience of the tech industry or testing. My mentee from there is now a successful lone tester.
I will share what did and did not work in our mentor/mentee relationship. We will explore together the various stages of learning for a person with no testing experience from day one right up to the day they were using ZAP and JMeter to successfully identify issues in the application. I’ll also talk about how I felt when my mentee became better than me at using some of these tools and how the roles became reversed somewhat.
We’ll look at how to build mentor/mentee rapport and create an environment that enables people to feel safe if they fail. Participants will get to hear the good, the bad and the ugly that can happen in a mentoring process from both the perspective of the mentor and the mentee.
In this session, I’ll share my own experiences with mentoring, with tips you can use to be an effective mentor, regardless of your experience level or situation.