Women in Testing: Spotlight on a pathfinder Quality Coach Katja Obring

Katja Obring, a thought leader in software testing with extensive experience in helping teams map out their QA process in an Agile and DevOps – oriented manner, wraps up our Women in Testing feature for Women's Month. Her opinions and background made it easier for me to understand that software testing is collaborative, innovative, and a proficient process rather than merely a technical one. Katja is an epitome of the transformational power of quality assurance in software development because of her distinct viewpoints and unwavering dedication to excellence. Come along as we explore her insightful experience in quality assurance and the significant journey she takes to raise the bar for quality in the rapidly changing tech industry.

How would you describe yourself to someone you’ve never met before?

I’m one of those people who have strong opinions, but I try deliberately to hold them quite loosely. I don’t think it’s a sign of weakness to change my mind, quite the opposite, actually, but that doesn’t mean I’m a pushover.

Kindness is a sadly underestimated value, and more important than most other traits. Be kind, always.

When was a time in your career, you were really proud of yourself ? What made you proud and why?

I think my proudest moments are always when somebody tells me I’ve made a positive impact on their life. Like a developer who thought testers are a waste of space - our first few communications got a bit spicy! But when we parted ways because I moved to another team, he made it a point to talk to me and tell me how I had changed his mind about testing and how he’d integrate that knowledge in his work in the future. That made me proud, and those are the moments I live for.

How is your industry likely to change in the next 5 years?

I’m not much into the hot takes and predicting the future. Software development has changed massively since I started 20 years ago in some ways, and in others it hasn’t changed at all.

Undoubtedly GenAI will have an impact, but honestly - testing has been declared dead about 4 times in the time I’ve been in the industry. At the end of the day we need software, and we need this software to work reliably. The manner in which we do things will change, but what or why we do it will remain relevant.

What are the 4 things you need to do to stay competitive in your field of work?

I think the time for the non-coding tester is over, and I advise all my students and mentees to learn to code, at the very least learn to read code.

Many people underestimate the power of people skills - if you’re pleasant to work with, and efficient in what you do you’ll go far.

Don’t try to learn all the tools, learn some that are relevant to your work and your interests. Understand how software works on a system level, understand it’s architecture. Learn about cloud environments, and what it really means when people say “no code”.

And last but certainly not least: learn to ask good questions. That is the number one skill for any tester, and for a number of roles adjacent to the field.

What do you think the impact of AI will be in software testing (manual and automation) and why?

I haven’t seen any AI implementation that was good enough to have any impact other than make our work harder.

Like many tools it has great promise, but stands and falls with with skill of the person using it. Like they say: a fool with a tool is still a fool.