Ask Me Anything: Diversity in Testing

(Heather) #1

Tonights “Ask Me Anything” was with a lady I admire greatly, @ashcole. Ash gave us guidance and suggestions on diversity in testing.

I personally feel that this is a massive topic and we could easily spend hours/days/weeks discussing it. With that in mind, I think it would be a good idea to continue the discussion here. Maybe there was a question you had that didn’t get answered. Perhaps you thought of one later. You are very welcome to ask all of those here :slight_smile:

Have you found good resources around diversity in testing? Do you feel like you/your company is doing enough in terms of diversity?

(Heather) #2

Related to neurodiversity:
https://webaim.org/

https://twitter.com/SalFreudenberg

(Daniel) #3

I’m currently working on (my first) job description for a hire. I am inspired by the conversation we had last night with Ash, and to apply that learning.

London and the South East of England are awash with techy folk. This makes crafting a job description very challenging, so we get a good set of applicants, but also diversifying the pool of candidates.

My client want me to utilise my network, rather than recruiters, which is also a challenge. I am a cis-white male, meaning that I am already recruiting from a position of privilege. Therefore, my network does consist of a lot of similar people, but also a lot of other types of people.

Recruiting people from outside the immediate London is harder, because of the size and developing culture of the business. Not everyone wants to live or work here, all for very valid reasons. Family, cost, personal preference, constraints on travel such as disability or finance, childcare support etc.

Anyway…I wish I could share the document itself, but maybe I can share snippets, to get reviews.

(Aaron) #4

Hey there

Neurodiversity in Tech is a bit of a pet topic of mine, so here are some resources I’ve collected over the last couple of years:

Here is a great collection of posters on the Dos and Don’ts of designing for accessibility:

A collection of resources on a variety of facets of neurodiversity in tech:

A talk I gave at AgileNZ: “Inclusive Collaboration - How our differences make the difference”

(Paul) #5

I find here in Sydney that the testing space is quite diverse actually despite the job market being extremely competitive (some tester jobs getting 300-400 applicants per place). For a start women are quite well represented on testing teams - In my current team which at one point had 12 members, we had at the most only two men including me. Both the test managers are women. Also we have a large contingent of testers in Sydney who have immigrated from India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and China, and who are well represented in all the places I have worked in. There is also good work being done by people like Catherine Karena and Mike Tozer in opening doors into the Sydney Testing market for people from deprived and neurodiverse backgrounds.

I suppose that areas that could be improved here are better representation of Indigenous Australian staff in tech and a (thankfully slowly dying) bias towards local (Australian) work experience by recruiters, however I wonder if there is anything that can be learned by other places from the Australian example.

(Heather) #6

The video is now live on the Dojo