 So, welcome everyone to the session five tries that all top performing automation engineers have scheduled by Marco Cruz. It's our pleasure to have you macro here. Thanks for that. Thank you so much. I appreciate the invite to this conference. I'm really excited about being here and also here and what the other speakers have to say. And welcome to everybody may be listening, listening in. So a little bit background on me. I am the founder of automate now which is a company that focuses on helping people succeed in software automation. I have eight years, more than eight years in software testing, and I'm just passionate about this industry just testing in general. It's something that really motivates me to just keep sharing knowledge and everything that anyone who will listen. So today, we're talking about the five traits that all type of forming automation engineers have right and that is a pretty bold, bold statement. And my promise to you is, hopefully by the end of this talk, you will come away with, you know, some concrete information that you can take interaction to take your career to the next level. There's a caveat to this, you know, some of the stuff that you're going to see here is not for everyone. Some of you may not be willing to try some of this stuff and there's a reason for that. That's why I've titled this for top performing people, you know, as this is something that's going to help you get to the next level in your career. And also some of the stuff that you're going to see here. It's applicable not only to the testing industry but other, you know, like other industries and just about everyday life. So let's go ahead and dive in. So I'll start with the question, you know, why do you think that some people get lucky, you know, sometimes we see people achieve success, they get paid raises to get promotions. It appears that it always in the right place at the right time. And everything seems to be going their way in on the surface. It may seem like they just have good luck on their side that that's how we summarize it when we don't understand anything. You cannot logically explain something, we just say, oh, that's, that's good luck, they're just lucky, you know. But what I would like to propose to you and just make you think about what if it's more than just luck, you know, and that's how we're going to explore in this talk. So here's Seneca's definition of luck. And I would like to say that, you know, a lottery winner, they still need to buy a lottery ticket in order to win. So essentially, they're not lucky, you know, even even person who wins the lottery, they had to take a certain action, they had to make a small investment. You know, they had to go to the store, buy a ticket, pick the numbers, you know, so they took some type of action in order to put themselves in line to be able to have a chance of winning the lottery. So there was some action in their part. And this leads me to my next statement, you know, which is a person who is not willing, for example, who's planning to learn how to play chess, they're not going to look at the instructions to learn how to play chess. So is a starts with a decision, you know, it starts with something that okay I want to achieve this goal by a certain time, or I want to get this pay raise, you know, and this is starts with a concrete definition of what your target is, you know, and that that's, that's what I'm trying to drive home here is that at some point in your life, you're going to have to make a decision okay what it is that you want to do, how you want to take your career to the next level, and hopefully you're going to see some good examples here. So let's keep moving here. So how can you prepare for for the opportunity that that Seneca is describing right. Let's take a look at some preparedness actions. And, you know, as this this takes me to item number one in the list, which is communication. And assessors, we focus a lot on the quality of the software, you know, but we pay very little attention to the quality of our communication. And on the screen you're seeing a picture of two silhouettes right the person on the left. They're able to get from point eight to point B, but you'll notice that they're, they don't do it very effectively the kind of erratic you know they kind of all over the place eventually they get to the point where they want to be, but it takes them a little while. While the person on the right they're able to get from point eight to point B with very minor issues you know that they're pretty much in a straight line, you know they're more effective communicators. And that is the distinction that we're trying to drive here you know that's that's the difference that having good communication is going to is going to do in your career. And who benefits from communication is it firstly starts with you, you know you you benefit because you become a more effective communicator and also your team will benefit you know your team will become more effective, more efficient, you will become more robust overall, and thirdly the company, the organization that you're working for they're going to benefit from this good communication. And you may be wondering like how does the company benefit you know, if you, I'm sure most of you are all of us you know at some point have been in search for a job, and we'll go on some search platform you know indeed or LinkedIn or what what have you you will see the job description, and pretty much 99% of them will have somewhere in there is going to save a good communication skills as one of the requirements for applying for that job, you know for getting that job. And what do you think that is you know what do you think employers value good communication. It's, it's important for them is they're not just trying to fill up empty space in that job description it's there's a reason why they put that bullet point in there. And there was a study that was conducted in 2011 was done by David Grossman his group conductors study on 400 companies which had each had 100,000 employees. And what they discovered is that on average, the companies each company had a loss of $62.4 million that's us dollars per company, because of inadequate communication to in between employees, you know, I want to say that again is 62.4 million dollars per company that's pretty significant you know, because there was ineffective communication between into employees. So that's, that's a pretty significant figure. So that's why companies value that you know value that good communication. So let's have a look at a formula that I discovered on this while I was researching this topic. And this woman that comes from the late MIT professor Patrick Winston, he defines the quality of communication by this formula which is the function of K times P times team, in which the letter K represents knowledge P represents practice and T represents And I would like to draw your attention to the size of the letters, you'll notice that the letter K is much larger than the letter T. And there's there's a reason for that. And that is because having pure talent is not enough to be good, have good communication. It's the knowledge that you have this can have the biggest impact on how you communicate, having a good breath and wealth of knowledge is going to profoundly influence your your effectiveness being effective communicator. And there's a quote that I like it's by Whitney junior, Whitney junior. He says, it's better to be prepared for an opportunity and that have one, then to have an opportunity in that be prepared. And this is where the, where the P comes into play, you know, we have to be ready for that opportunity. So even if you are not don't have the chance right now or a certain skill is there is better for you to be prepared for that. So when, let's say for example, that you're trying to move into a certain job right but you don't have an opportunity to move into that job or the type of job, whatever the job and maybe you could start preparing now so that when you do have the chance, or you're able to move into that role, you're ready for it. You know, that's, that's the preparedness part. And that's really going to help you a lot, you know, I can speak from experience in the past where I may have been doing a certain skill. So when I started moving to a certain another area and I started learning on my own on my free time. And when the time came I was, I was ready I was prepared for that in when I get interviewed I was ready I had all the answers and I was able to be able to move in and perform effectively in that in that new role. So we see that knowledge is very important. But what type of knowledge should you have. Let's go to the next slide. Number two, which is product knowledge, you know, it's important for us to get as testers, you know, to get very familiar with the software that we're testing or what the application you're testing. In this example you seen a picture of a cockpit, you know, and what I like to the knowledge that I like to bring is a pilot has to be very well acquainted with every instrument within the cockpit they have to be familiar with everything that's there you know at their disposal and they have to be good at what they do at their job right. Because what happens is that they say that there's an emergency they have to take some emergency action they have to they don't have time to call somebody at that time you know that they have to be very effective you know in using all those instruments and to be to be able to execute at a high level. And this I think the same thing should apply to testers you should strive to be very good at knowing your product you know what you're testing you know become very familiar with it. And that is going to help you to become a better tester overall. So that's that's what I want to you know just leave it within that with that regard. You know, not doing this you know what could be the, the, the effects of that you know, this could lead to catastrophic results in some areas. Let's say for example you're testing some medical, you know, software that goes into medical equipment you know equipment that is administering medicine to a patient, or something like that, you know, that's, you know, if you don't do a good enough job or a very good job. In essence, you know, it could potentially be fatal for the patient and you give them to to hire those. And that you know that that means they have faulty software, and you didn't do a good enough job you know you didn't take your job seriously. You know that's just one example, something else that I could think of as safety, public safety devices, you know so for such as traffic lights you know their software that goes into those traffic lights so you want to be responsible for the software so you know you don't want to crash and you know cars crashing into one another you know at traffic points. So, that's, you can see how everything ties together you know just knowing the product you know really plays a big role on how good you become, how good a tester you become. Also learning the tech stack you know learning how your application is built you know what type of frameworks are being used to build the front end, you know what type of databases, programming languages are being used in the back end. It gives you a better knowledge and it prepares you more to be able to test the application more effectively. You're able to find those corner cases, those as cases that are sometimes difficult to reproduce, having that extra bit of knowledge you know and how the product is working the back end gives you better ability to find those issues. So, that's the kind of knowledge should you acquire. And here we have item number three on the list which is domain knowledge. And in here I'm referring to industry domain knowledge, and it has to do with like for example medical insurance financial services. In my in the past I worked in an insurance company prior to going there I have zero experience in insurance. So I took it upon myself to you know to level up my skills to learn that industry to to read all the material that was available. I could become a better tester in that industry so that's the that's what you should strive to do as well you know if you go into a new industry that you have like very little experience in. You should try to get all, you know, become better at familiarizing yourself with the terminology the jargon that is using that industry, so that it makes you a better tester overall. Another example that I can give you is, let's say they're testing software that falls under protecting it like here in the United States we have a law called the hippo law, and that protects medical information or private patient information. Let's say they're testing some application that is dealing with private information for medical patients. It would be, it would benefit you to become familiar with the law, you don't have to be an expert or anything like that. But the more you know about the law the better, you're going to be able to test that law, you know, be able to test the application to make sure that it's following the law. You don't want the application to be disclosing or, or, or, you don't want it to get hacked that information gets, you know, falls into the wrong hands right now, in that case you know your company may get sued over or those those issues and you don't want that you know so just being responsible overall. Now we're moving to item number four which is continuous improvement and I'll give you guys a few moments to read this quote from Aaron Nightingale. So, I think you will agree after reading this that a lot of it, you know, this quote is very true. It could be a harsh reality but essentially you know it's this is this is what really what you're looking at when you're working for an employee you know and this is what the is from, from their end you know, in keeping you you know how good of an employee are you how valuable are you to them. And I would like to talk about you know like the spin cycles and most software is nowadays is being released in spin cycles, every time we release an application to, to the public we try to make it better, you know, to provide a better product. And I think in the same sense, we should strive to become better, even at least 1% better each day you know whatever it is where you're reading a book where you're trying to better your skills improve, you know, working on a course on something that's going to better you in some way that 1% is going to help you long, big time in the long run. Examples that I can give about this, you know, and could be like learning some HTML learning CSS learning how to build a website, you know you don't have to be a professional website by just learning how it works how it is constructed. And I'm aware that some of you may already know this stuff but there are people out there who think that this is not something that is necessary for them to perform their job. But this stuff is really going to benefit you in the long run, learning how to query a database or even building a small database you know how to create tables and rows input data in their API testing load and performance security testing or even just how the internet works you know when you type a URL into the into the browser. How does the, how does the information come to you know how does that get resolved you know, just things like that is going to help you. So as a result you're going to become a greater asset to any company and the organization they work for, they're going to value you because you provide you know a lot of good quality for them you know you become a great asset for that for that company. And lastly we have item number five which is give more than expected of you and this is a big one I think this is the most important one. In every field, you're going to have three groups of people, and the group one is those who wait for things to happen. And the group two is those who make things happen in group three those who don't know what happened. So I would encourage you to be in the group that makes things happen. Here we have a picture of someone, you know, working out, you know, let's say that you wanted to get in shape. You cannot expect to get in shape by just living your regular life you know and just watching TV sitting on a couch. That's not going to come to you that the physical fitness, there has to be a process right you have to take some action you have to go to the gym you have to work out you have to run in all those things right so you have to take some action in order to get to achieve that goal that you want to do. So, so if you if you just live a normal life, you're not going to get that right so that that's where the giving more than expected comes in right. You cannot expect to get a promotion or higher salary, if you're just doing the least that is expected of you, an employer is going to ask you okay what why do you deserve this promotion why should I give you a race. What have you doing outside of your, your, your, you know, what is required of you to deserve this race you know so this is think questions that may come maybe ask to you or even not ask you but they're thinking about these things you know who should get this race you know who should get this promotion, working places where they only give promotions to certain people or give races to certain people who have been outstanding throughout the year. You know so, at the end of the year the company may be in a tight budget and they may only have limited bonuses, for example, and they may only give it to the employees who have been outstanding throughout the year, and this is where you're going to benefit you know because you have always gone above and beyond and there's going to be no question as to who should be the beneficiary of you know this promotions or these bonuses right. And I know I know of people who think that you know I will do more when when the employer pays me more you know that's when I will do more right now you know if they don't pay me more than I won't do more and I would highly discourage you from taking that that approach because that's not going to benefit you in the long run you're you're expecting to receive before you give you have to give more and then you're going to receive you know that's that's the fundamental law. And so may may argue that well, my company's going to take advantage of me if I'm always giving more. But you have to evaluate you know the company you're working for if you see that they're taking advantage of you, perhaps it's time for you to look for another employee who's going to value, you know, who you are, you know, your worth is going to is going to value for for what you're worth, you know so in place where always giving more, they're always going to be have a higher value and you're going to be more marketable, you know, everywhere that you go, you're going to be able to showcase you know just how good of an employee you are how valuable you are. And, you know, that takes me to the takeaways from from this presentation so here you have the five points of, you know, five things that you can take the actions that you can take in order to take your career to the next level and my challenge to you is, you know, try to put this stuff into action and and see for yourself you know that the impact that it's going to have in your life in your career overall, you know, and I hope that someday you will come back to me and say Marco, you know, thank you, you know you help me with this. And, you know, it has helped me tremendously and that's why I wanted to share with you guys because I know that this this this works you know this this things work. And yeah so thank you so much for listening thank you for being a part of this community and just, you know, thank you so much. And I'll complete my presentation with that. Thank you Marco for the wonderful session, and we are really learned a lot from the top five tries which every engineer should process. Awesome thank you so much it was a pleasure being here and you know, wish everyone the best luck. Yes, hope everyone enjoyed the session. Thank you. Bye bye.