Silke

My current jobs

Full-time mom at home

I run a household together with my husband and raise an almost 3-year-old son. This takes up a lot of time.

Full-time software tester at TOPdesk

Now, this is where the exciting part starts.

At TOPdesk, testers are a vital part of development teams. We are not separate entities. I am part of the whole agile process from beginning till end. I get to throw my ideas already when huddling a story, even while grooming and pokering it. Then I write test plans and come up with weirder ideas. I seldom find bugs, but when I do the tester in me rejoices. It makes me feel like the team still needs me. Speaking of which, my awesome scrum team consists of 4 developers, 1 designer, 1 scrum master, 1 product owner and 1 tester. We work harmoniously together, like a perfect fit. A match made in heaven.
By the way, I am not a technical person at all. In the software testing catalogue,  you can find me under the manual testing shelf.

I also help organize the international testers’ guild once every 2 weeks. We used to call these CoP (Community of Practice) time, but the name was changed recently to guild. Just because we do not work on projects together, doesn’t mean that testers don’t meet and talk to each other. We have monthly meetings during which we discuss topics relevant to and for the guild, and local meetings as well. We also try to meet personally once a year, where we spend at least 2 days with presentations, discussions, and workshops.

And then there’s the time I spend doing stuff that I am interested in. We call this “Apenkooi”. This also takes place once every two weeks. These apenkooi projects of mine not only give me a diversion from the normal work I have in the team, but also gives me the possibility to learn new things and grow.

All-in-all, I am very happy with both job states right now. I enjoy all the tasks I am doing, and I feel challenged when some technical testing tasks come my way.

So why switch careers you ask? Find out in my next post!